Evaluating the HPC Performance and Energy-Efficiency of Intel and ARM-based systems with synthetic and bioinformatics workloads

The increasing demand for High Performance Computing (HPC) paired with the higher power requirements of the ever-faster systems has led to the search for both performant and more energy-efficient architectures. This article compares and contrasts the performance and energy efficiency of two modern, traditional Intel Xeon and low power ARM-based clusters, which are tested with the recently developed High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark and the ABySS, FASTA and MrBayes bioinformatics applications. We show a higher Performance per Watt valuation of the ARM cluster, and lower energy usage during the tests, which does not offset the much faster job completion rate obtained by the Intel cluster, making the latter more suitable for the considered workloads given the disparity in the performance results.