Relative Performance Projection on Arm Architectures

With the advent of multi- many-core processors and hardware accelerators, choosing a specific architecture to renew a supercomputer can become very tedious. This decision process should consider the current and future parallel application needs and the design of the target software stack. It should also consider the single-core behavior of the application as it is one of the performance limitations in today’s machines. In such a scheme, performance hints on the impact of some hardware and software stack modifications are mandatory to drive this choice. This paper proposes a workflow for performance projection based on execution on an actual processor and the application’s behavior. This projection evaluates the performance variation from an existing core of a processor to a hypothetical one to drive the design choice. For this purpose, we characterize the maximum sustainable performance of the target machine and analyze the application using the software stack of the target machine. To validate this approach, we apply it to three applications of the CORAL benchmark suite: LULESH, MiniFE, and Quicksilver, using a single-core of two Arm-based architectures: Marvell ThunderX2 and Arm Neoverse N1. Finally, we follow this validation work with an example of design-space exploration around the SVE vector size, the choice of DDR4 and HBM2, and the software stack choice on A64FX on our applications with a pool of three source architectures: Arm Neoverse N1, Marvell ThunderX2, and Fujitsu A64FX.