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Comparison of HPC Architectures for Computing All-Pairs Shortest Paths. Intel Xeon Phi KNL vs NVIDIA Pascal

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Computer Science – CACIC 2020 (CACIC 2020)

Abstract

Today, one of the main challenges for high-performance computing systems is to improve their performance by keeping energy consumption at acceptable levels. In this context, a consolidated strategy consists of using accelerators such as GPUs or many-core Intel Xeon Phi processors. In this work, devices of the NVIDIA Pascal and Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing architectures are described and compared. Selecting the Floyd-Warshall algorithm as a representative case of graph and memory-bound applications, optimized implementations were developed to analyze and compare performance and energy efficiency on both devices. As it was expected, Xeon Phi showed superior when considering double-precision data. However, contrary to what was considered in our preliminary analysis, it was found that the performance and energy efficiency of both devices were comparable using single-precision datatype.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.top500.org/green500/.

  2. 2.

    Top500 www.top500.org.

  3. 3.

    If there is no path between nodes i and j, their distance is considered to be infinite (usually represented as the largest positive value).

  4. 4.

    The characteristics of each platform were described at the end of Sect. 2.1.

  5. 5.

    Intel Performance Counter Monitor: http://www.intel.com/software/pcm.

  6. 6.

    NVIDIA System Management Interface: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-system-management-interface.

  7. 7.

    Naturally, it is also possible to develop an implementation that processes the matrix in parts and does not have this memory limitation. However, the need to run I/O operations for each round would significantly degrade performance.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the support of NVIDIA through the donation of the Titan X GPU used in this research.

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Correspondence to Enzo Rucci .

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Costanzo, M., Rucci, E., Costi, U., Chichizola, F., Naiouf, M. (2021). Comparison of HPC Architectures for Computing All-Pairs Shortest Paths. Intel Xeon Phi KNL vs NVIDIA Pascal. In: Pesado, P., Eterovic, J. (eds) Computer Science – CACIC 2020. CACIC 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1409. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75836-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75836-3_3

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