The Shift from Processor Power Consumption to Performance Variations: Fundamental Implications at Scale

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The Intel Haswell-EP processor generation introduces several major advancements of power control and energy-efficiency features. For computationally intense applications using advanced vector extension instructions, the processor cannot continuously operate at full speed but instead reduces its frequency below the nominal frequency to maintain operations within thermal design power (TDP) limitations. Moreover, the running average power limitation (RAPL) mechanism to enforce the TDP limitation has changed from a modeling to a measurement approach. The combination of these two novelties have significant implications. Through measurements on an Intel Sandy Bridge-EP cluster, we show that previous generations have sustained homogeneous performance across multiple CPUs and compensated for hardware manufacturing variability through varying power consumption. In contrast, our measurements on a Petaflop Haswell system show that this generation exhibits rather homogeneous power consumption limited by the TDP and capped by the improved RAPL while providing inhomogeneous performance under full load. Since all of these controls are transparent to the user, this behavior is likely to complicate performance analysis tasks and impact tightly coupled parallel applications.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Science - Research and Development
Pages197-205
Number of pages9
Volume31
EditionNeuerscheinung
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 84982274255
ORCID /0000-0002-8491-770X/work/141543276
ORCID /0009-0003-0666-4166/work/151475569
ORCID /0000-0002-5437-3887/work/154740498

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • power, processor, performance