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Are our dense linear algebra libraries energy-friendly?

Time–power–energy trade-offs in BLAS and LAPACK

  • Special Issue Paper
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Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

In this paper we conduct a detailed analysis of the sources of power dissipation and energy consumption during the execution of current dense linear algebra kernels on multicore processors, binding these two metrics together with performance to the arithmetic intensity of the operations. In particular, by leveraging the RAPL interface of an Intel E5 (“Sandy Bridge”) six-core CPU, we decompose the power-energy duo into its core (mainly due to floating-point units and cache), RAM (off-chip accesses), and uncore components,performing a series of illustrative experiments for a range of memory-bound to CPU-bound high performance kernels. Additionally, we investigate the energy proportionality of these three architecture components for the execution of linear algebra routines on the Intel E5.

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Notes

  1. According to [18], the “core” mainly comprises the floating-point execution units, branch prediction logic, and the higher levels of cache. The “uncore” is basically composed of the last level of cache (L3 in this processor), the memory and interconnect controllers, and the power control logic.

  2. We also evaluated Intel MKL 10.3 and GotoBLAS 1.13, but observed higher performance with OpenBLAS for the kernels and platform targeted in this study.

  3. http://www.netlib.org/lapack version 3.5.0.

  4. For simplicity, hereafter we neglect lower order terms in the arithmetic and storage costs.

  5. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2011-23283 of MINECO and FEDER, and the EU Project FP7 318793 “EXA2GREEN.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Depto. de Ingeniería y Ciencia de Computadores, Universitat Jaume I, 12.071 , Castellón, Spain

    José I. Aliaga, María Barreda & Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí

  2. Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, 22.527 , Hamburg, Germany

    Manuel F. Dolz

Authors
  1. José I. Aliaga
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  2. María Barreda
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  3. Manuel F. Dolz
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  4. Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí
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Correspondence to María Barreda.

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Aliaga, J.I., Barreda, M., Dolz, M.F. et al. Are our dense linear algebra libraries energy-friendly?. Comput Sci Res Dev 30, 187–196 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-014-0263-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-014-0263-y

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