A challenge with profiling applications lies in how to interpret the profile results. In particular, most programmers do not give the power profile plots more than a cursory glance. Following is an example waterfall plot showing the power utilization for an NWChem run on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors:
My recent column in Scientific Computing, “Using Profile Information for Optimization, Energy Savings and Procurements“ notes that profiling is a big-data task, but one where the rewards can be significant — including potentially saving megawatts of power on a leadership class system and/or reducing the time to solution so more scientists can utilize these precious resources.
For example, the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the 33 PF/s RMAX (54 PF/s RPEAK) Tianhe-2 supercomputer, achieves its number one ranking through the use of 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P coprocessors. This system has a peak energy consumption of 24 megawatts (million watts). Instrumenting such systems at scale is important to understanding application power efficiency as even simple application configuration and software changes have the potential to save literally megawatts of power. Even a 20 watt energy savings per Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor translates to a megawatt of power savings for applications that use all the Tianhe-2 devices.
A number of power saving studies on Intel Xeon Phi exist in the literature.
For example the paper, “Energy Evaluation for Applications with Different Thread Affinities on the Intel Xeon Phi“, by Lawson et. al. measured energy consumption as a function of thread affinity and number of threads on an Intel Xeon Phi. Thread affinity and thread count on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors is easily accomplished by simply defining a couple shell environment variables – no code modifications are required. The Lawson paper showed that “varying thread affinity may improve both performance and energy, which is the most apparent under the compact affinity tests when the number of threads is larger than three per core. The energy savings reached as high as 48% for the CG NAS benchmark”.
Other savings can be significant if not so dramatic – especially when multiplied by the Tianhe-2 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. Shao and Brooks investigated the Linpack benchmark suite using an instruction-level energy model. They observed increases in energy efficiency as high as 10% on Linpack and between 1% to 5% on real applications. A microbenchmarking study by Choi et al. found that the Intel Xeon Phi offers energy benefits to highly irregular data processing workloads. Apparently the Xeon Phi requires an order of magnitude less energy per access during random memory access operations, which is a boon for sparse matrix and graph algorithms.
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