Performance Evaluation and Energy Efficiency of High-Density HPC Platforms Based on Intel, AMD and ARM Processors

Due to growth of energy consumption by HPC servers and data centers many research efforts aim at addressing the problem of energy efficiency. Hence, the use of low power processors such as Intel Atom and ARM Cortex have recently gained more interest. In this arti- cle, we compare performance and energy efficiency of cutting-edge high- density HPC platform enclosures featuring either very high-performing processors (such as Intel Core i7 or E7) yet having low power-efficiency, or the reverse i.e. energy efficient processors (such as Intel Atom, AMD Fusion or ARM Cortex A9) yet with limited computing capacity. Our objective was to quantify in a very pragmatic way these general pur- pose CPUs using a set of reference benchmarks and applications run in an HPC environment, the trade-off that could exist between computing and power efficiency.