The performance characterization of the RSC PetaStream module

The RSC PetaStream architecture is a massively parallel computer design based on Intel® Xeon® Phi manycore co-processors. Each RSC PetaStream module contains eight Intel Xeon Phi co-processors with PCI-express fabric and Infiniband interconnect for intermodule communication. This paper concentrates on the performance of a single RSC PetaStream module, evaluated with the help of low-level (point-to-point MPI), library (linear algebra, MAGMA) and application-level (classical molecular dynamics, GROMACS and LAMMPS codes) tests. The Intel Xeon E5-2690 top bin CPU dual-socket system has been used for comparison. This early evaluation demonstrates that in general each Xeon Phi co-processor of RSC PetaStream delivers approximately the same performance as dual-socket Intel Xeon E5 system, with only a half energy-to-solution. Fine-grain parallelism of Intel Xeon Phi cores takes advantage of higher messages exchange rates on MPI level for communication of threads placed on different Xeon Phi chips.