Study and Benchmarking of modern computing architectures

Abstract

Modern computing architectures change rapidly and exhibit high levels of complexity and heterogeneity. For example, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) will have one general purpose cluster and three smaller clusters with Emerging Technologies like Many Core architecture from Intel, Power from IBM and ARMv8 from Fujitsu. These are technologies currently being developed to accelerate the arrival of the new generation of pre-exascale supercomputers. We have analysed these architectures in order to gain knowledge and experience to get the best performance possible from them running HPC applications that exploit the strengths of each architecture. Additionally, we have run a benchmark suite on each available computer architecture with the purpose of characterize them. In order to complement the benchmark results, we have decided to analyse the execution of each benchmark with a performance analysis tool. There already exist several performance analysis tools which cover different performance areas like hardware events counting, performance simulation, traces, etc. However, these tools are dependent of being ported to modern computing architectures and they normally have different usages for different architectures. We propose a solution based on the perf_event interface, which is included on the Linux kernel, that allows us to analyse the benchmark execution on the different modern computing architectures and it allows users easily to get performance information of their applications. The information that we provide with our solution are a sampling trace of hardware events, a profiling report and monitoring information of CPU and memory. Our solution enhances the performance results of other tools with extra features that help a better understanding of the bottlenecks of applications and/or architectures, and so, benchmarking. In addition, our proposal can be used in any system with Linux.