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Performance Improvement with

Intel Xeon® Phi

by Ashish Kumar Singh and Calvin Jacob

This blog details the performance improvement that has been achieved using Intel Xeon® Phi on the current

generation Dell servers as compared to the same server of CPU configuration only. Though the performance runs

carried out consisted of multiple iterations of runs along with multiple BIOS options, only the best results are recorded

in this blog. For each of the application, the settings which yielded the best performance are recorded in the results

description for each of the applications. All the performance runs were carried out with hyper threading (logical

processor) disabled. The system configuration of the systems used are as below:

Del

PowerEd

e® R730

Operatin

stem

ed Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5

CPU 2x Intel Xeon® E5-2695v3

emor

16x 16GB DDR4 DIMMs, 2133MHz

Co-

rocesso

2x Intel Xeon® Phi 7120

ower Suppl

2x 1100W (non-redundant)

ntel Compile

ntel Parallel Studio XE 2015

river

or co-

rocesso

PSS 3.3

The applications chosen along with the respective versions and the domains are as below:

pplication Version

omain

igh Performance

inpack

v2.1 System Benchmark

STREAM 5.10 S

stem Benchmark

SHO

v.1.1.4a-mic S

stem

enchmark

AMD v2.10

olecular D

namics

NSYS Mechanica

v15.0

inite Element Anal

sis

The BIOS options selected for this blog as below:

stem BIOS Options Settin

emor

Settin

s > Snoop Mode Cluster on Die

rocessor Settings > Logical

rocesso

isabled

Summary of content (7 pages)

PAGE 1
Performance Improvement with Intel Xeon® Phi by Ashish Kumar Singh and Calvin Jacob This blog details the performance improvement that has been achieved using Intel Xeon® Phi on the current generation Dell servers as compared to the same server of CPU configuration only. Though the performance runs carried out consisted of multiple iterations of runs along with multiple BIOS options, only the best results are recorded in this blog.
PAGE 2
Processor Settings > QPI Speed Processor Settings > Configurable TDP System Profile Settings > System Profile Maximum Data Rate Nominal Performance Specification of Intel Xeon® E5-2695v3: Cores Clock speed Intel QPI Speed Maximum TDP Cache Memory Channels 14 Cores 2.3GHz 9.6GT/s 120W 35MB 4 Specification of Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P: Cores Clock Speed Memory Memory Channels Maximum Memory Bandwidth L2 Cache Maximum TDP 61 1.238GHz 16GB GDDR5 16 352GB/s 30.
PAGE 3
Xeon® Phi was set to ECC ON and Turbo OFF. The achieved throughput on CPU only was taken as the baseline. Below is the comparison of the scale-up performance runs carried out on configurations with processors and Intel Xeon Phi. High Performance Linpack (GFLOPS) on Dell PowerEdge® R730 2x Intel Xeon® E5-2695v3, 2x Intel Xeon® E5-2695v3, 2x Intel Xeon E5-2695v3 1x Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P 2x Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P 839.3 1720.5 2634.5 (Click on images to enlarge.
PAGE 4
The achieved stream bandwidth on CPU only configuration on R730 was taken as the baseline. We observe performance improvements of 50% to 70% on configurations with one Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P and two Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P as against the CPU only configuration. The best STREAM bandwidth was observed on Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P with ECC set to OFF and turbo set to ON. SHOC measures the maximum device memory bandwidth for different levels of the memory hierarchy and different access patterns.
PAGE 5
2.65 0.9 0.25 APoA1 4.29 ATPase 1.39 STMV 0.4 6.02 2.06 0.58 ApoA1 gene provides instructions for making a protein called Apolipoprotein A-I. With the ApoA1 dataset, we observe 60% and 130% performance improvements on configuration with one and two Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P respectively as compared to CPU only configurations. ATPase are a class of enzymes that catalyze the decomposition of ATP into ADP and free phosphate ion.
PAGE 6
STMV (Satellite Tobacco Mosaic Virus) is a small, icosahedral plant virus. With the STMV dataset, we observe 60% and 130% performance improvements on configuration with one and two Intel Xeon® Phi 7120P respectively as compared to CPU only configurations. ANSYS Mechanical is a comprehensive FEA analysis (finite element) tool for structural analysis, including linear, nonlinear and dynamic studies.
PAGE 7
Concluding remarks: It has been noted from the results as recorded above that there is a considerable amount of performance gain for most of the applications when using Intel Xeon® Phi with performance improvements in the range of up to 300% across the chosen spectrum of applications and the add-on Intel Xeon® Phi configuration.