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New vs. Old: Comparing Broadwell performance for CAE Applications across generations

Mayura Deshmukh, Ashish K Singh and Neha Kashyap, April 2016

With the refresh of Dell’s 13

generation servers with the recently released Broadwell (BDW) processors, some

obvious questions come to mind such as how the new processors compare with the older generation processors.

This blog, fourth in the series of “Broadwell Performance for HPC,” focuses on answering this question. It compares

the performance of various CAE applications for five Broadwell Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 series processor models with

previous generation Intel processors.

Last week’s blog talked about the impact of BIOS options for each of the CAE applications. Here we focus on how

much better the performance of the Broadwell processors is as compared to the previous generation Haswell (HSW)

and Ivy-bridge (IVB) processors for these CAE applications. Table 1 shows the applications that we are comparing

and Table 2 describes the server configuration used for the study. For LS-DYNA, the benchmarks run on the IVB and

HSW (sse binary) and for ANSYS Fluent, benchmarks run on Westmere (WSM), Ivy-bridge (IVB), Sandy-bridge(SB)

and HSW used different software versions (whatever latest version was available at the time) than what is

mentioned in Table 1. STAR-CCM+ and OpenFOAM version for benchmarks run on both HSW and BDW were same.

Table 1 - Applications and benchmarks

Application

Version

Metric

MPI

Benchmark

LS-DYNA®

8.0.0

Elapsed time

Platform MPI 9.1.0

 car2car with endtime=0.02

STAR-CCM+®

10.04.011

Average

Elapsed time

Platform MPI 9.1.3

 Civil_20m

 EglinStoreSeparation

 HlMach10

 Kcs

 LeMans_100M

 Lemans_17m

 Reactor9M

 TurboCharger

 Vtm

ANSYS® Fluent®

v16

Solver rating

Platform MPI 9.1.2.1

 truck_poly_14m

OpenFOAM

2.4.0

Clock time

Open MPI 1.10.0

 Motorbike 11M

Table 2 - Server configuration

Components

Details

Server

PowerEdge R630

Processor

• 2 x E5-2650 v4 12c, 2.2/1.8 GHz, 105W, 30MB cache

• 2 x E5-2690 v4 14c, 2.6/2.1 GHz, 135W, 35MB cache

• 2 x E5-2697Av4 16c, 2.6/2.2 GHz, 145W, 40MB cache

• 2 x E5-2698 v4 20c, 2.2/1.8 GHz, 135W, 50MB cache

• 2 x E5-2699 v4 22c, 2.2/1.8 GHz, 145W, 55MB cache

Memory

256GB - 16 x 16GB 2400 MHz DDR4 RDIMMs

Hard drive

6 x 300GB SAS 6Gbps 10K rpm

RAID controller

PERC H330 mini

Summary of content (5 pages)

PAGE 1
New vs. Old: Comparing Broadwell performance for CAE Applications across generations Mayura Deshmukh, Ashish K Singh and Neha Kashyap, April 2016 With the refresh of Dell’s 13th generation servers with the recently released Broadwell (BDW) processors, some obvious questions come to mind such as how the new processors compare with the older generation processors. This blog, fourth in the series of “Broadwell Performance for HPC,” focuses on answering this question.
PAGE 2
Operating System BIOS options BIOS iDRAC Firmware Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 (3.10.0-327.el7.x86_64) System profile - Performance Logical Processor - Disabled Power Supply Redundant Policy - Not Redundant Power Supply Hot Spare Policy - Disabled I/O Non-Posted Prefetch - Disabled Snoop Mode - Opportunistic Snoop Broadcast (OSB) for OpenFOAM and Cluster on Die (COD) for all the other applications Node interleaving - Disabled 2.0.0 2.30.30.
PAGE 3
percentages at the top of the BDW avx2 orange bar describe the percentage improvement of the BDW processors over HSW E5-2697 v3 avx2 (grey bar in the graph). The 12 core BDW E5-2650 v4 which has fewer cores and lower frequency understandably performs 11% lower than the Haswell E5-2697 v3 processor.
PAGE 4
12core E5-2650 performs 11-20% lower than the E5-2697 v3. Similar to LS-DYNA, the per core performance of the 14core and the 16core is 2% to 11% better than the HSW E5-2697 v3 making them good options for STAR-CCM+ as well. ANSYS Fluent is a computational fluid dynamics application. The graph in Figure 3 shows the performance of truck_poly_14m for Sandy-bridge (SB), Ivy-bridge (IVB), HSW and BDW processors compared to the Westmere (WSM) processor shown as the redline set at one.
PAGE 5
Performance relative to E5-2697 v3 1.4 HSW vs. BDW - OpenFOAM Motorbike 11M 1.30 1.3 1.2 1.17 1.1 1.04 1.0 0.9 0.85 0.8 0.77 0.7 1.12 1.17 1.19 1.21 1.21 0.6 E5-2650 v4 12c, 2.2/1.8 GHz 105W, 2400 MT/s E5-2690 v4 14c, 2.6/2.1 E5-2697A v4 16c, 2.6/2.2 E5-2698 v4 20c, 2.2/1.8 GHz, 135W, 2400 MT/s GHz, 145W, 2400 MT/s GHz, 135W, 2400MT/s Relative Perf. per core E5-2699 v4 22c, 2.2/1.8 GHz, 145W, 2400 MT/s Baseline - HSW E5-2697 v3 14c, 2.6/2.2 GHz, 145W, 2133 MT/s Figure 4: HSW vs.