Early Application Performance at the Hartree Centre with the OpenPOWER Architecture

The Hartree Centre has been established as a UK focus for industrial engagement. STFC has acquired a new IBM system based on the OpenPOWER architecture, comprising 32 nodes with POWER8 CPUs and NVIDIA Kepler K80 GPUs. We report early evaluation of the system using some real applications based on the Lattice Boltzmann Method, Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulence and using FFTs. No optimisation has been carried out yet, but results are encouraging with performance comparable or better on a per core basis to Intel IvyBridge CPUs. Use of the GPUs for suitable algorithms such as Lattice Boltzmann kernels and for FFTs provides further performance enhancements.