Evaluating SoC power efficiency through N-body application

Abstract

Currently, the High Performance Computing (HPC) sector is undergoing a profound phase of innovation, in which the main stopper in order to achieve "exascale" performance is the power-consumption. The usage of "unconventional" low-cost computing systems is therefore of great interest for several scientific communities looking for a better trade-off between performance and power consumption. In this technical report, we make a performance assessment of commodity low-power System on Chip (SoC) using a direct N-body application for astrophysics. We also describe the methodology we have employed to measure the power drained by the application while running. We find that SoC technology could represent a valid alternative to traditional technology for HPC in terms of good trade-off between time-to-solution and energy-to-solution. This work arises in the framework of the ExaNeSt and EuroExa projects, which investigate the design of a SoC-based, low-power HPC architecture with a dedicated interconnection scalable to million of compute units.