Comparative Performance Evaluation of Modern Heterogeneous High-Performance Computing Systems CPUs

Abstract

The study presents a comparison of computing systems based on IBM POWER8, IBM POWER9, and Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 processors running parallel applications. Memory subsystem bandwidth was studied, parallel programming technologies were compared, and the operating modes and capabilities of simultaneous multithreading technology were analyzed. Performance analysis for the studied computing systems running parallel applications based on the OpenMP and MPI technologies was carried out by using the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. An assessment of the results obtained during experimental calculations led to the conclusion that IBM POWER8 and Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 systems have almost the same maximum memory bandwidth, but require a different number of threads for efficient utilization. The IBM POWER9 system has the highest maximum bandwidth, which can be attributed to the large number of memory channels per socket. Based on the results of numerical experiments, recommendations are given on how the hardware of a similar grade can be utilized to solve various scientific problems, including recommendations on optimal processor architecture choice for leveraging the operation of high-performance hybrid computing platforms.