Exploring Application Performance on Emerging Hybrid-Memory Supercomputers

IB Peng and S Markidis and E Laure and G Kestor and R Gioiosa, PROCEEDINGS OF 2016 IEEE 18TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATIONS; IEEE 14TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SMART CITY; IEEE 2ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DATA SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS (HPCC/SMARTCITY/DSS), 473-480 (2016).

DOI: 10.1109/HPCC-SmartCity-DSS.2016.102

Next-generation supercomputers will feature more hierarchical and heterogeneous memory systems with different memory technologies working side-by-side. A critical question is whether at large scale existing HPC applications and emerging data-analytics workloads will have performance improvement or degradation on these systems. We propose a systematic and fair methodology to identify the trend of application performance on emerging hybrid-memory systems. We model the memory system of next- generation supercomputers as a combination of "fast" and "slow" memories. We then analyze performance and dynamic execution characteristics of a variety of workloads, from traditional scientific applications to emerging data analytics to compare traditional and hybrid-memory systems. Our results show that data analytics applications can clearly benefit from the new system design, especially at large scale. Moreover, hybrid-memory systems do not penalize traditional scientific applications, which may also show performance improvement.

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