Making the Most of SMT in HPC: System- and Application-Level Perspectives

This work presents an end-to-end methodology for quantifying the performance and power benefits of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) for HPC centers and applies this methodology to a production system and workload. Ultimately, SMT’s value system-wide depends on whether users effectively employ SMT a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACM transactions on architecture and code optimization 2014-12, Vol.11 (4), p.1-26
Main Authors: Porter, Leo, Laurenzano, Michael A., Tiwari, Ananta, Jundt, Adam, Ward, Jr, William A., Campbell, Roy, Carrington, Laura
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Architecture
Lightweight
Mathematical models
Methodology
Monitors
Optimization
Weight reduction
Workload
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Summary:This work presents an end-to-end methodology for quantifying the performance and power benefits of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) for HPC centers and applies this methodology to a production system and workload. Ultimately, SMT’s value system-wide depends on whether users effectively employ SMT at the application level. However, predicting SMT’s benefit for HPC applications is challenging; by doubling the number of threads, the application’s characteristics may change. This work proposes statistical modeling techniques to predict the speedup SMT confers to HPC applications. This approach, accurate to within 8%, uses only lightweight, transparent performance monitors collected during a single run of the application.
ISSN:1544-3566
1544-3973
DOI:10.1145/2687651