Performance evaluation of the Intel Optane DC memory with scientific benchmarks

Intel Optane technology is a cost-effective solution to create large non-volatile memory pools, which is attractive to many scientific applications. Last year Intel® OptaneTM DC Persistent Memory in DIMM (PMM) form-factor was introduced, which is capable of being used as main memory device. This technology promises faster memory access comparing to Intel® OptaneTM DC P4800X SSD with Intel® Memory Drive Technology devices available previously. In this paper, we present new benchmark data for the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. We studied the performance of scientific application from domains of quantum chemistry and computational astrophysics. To put performance of the Intel Optane DC PMM in comparison, we used two memory configurations: DDR4 only system and Optane DC SSD with Intel Memory Drive Technology (IMDT) that is another option for memory extension. We see that PMM is superior to IMDT in almost all our benchmarks, to no surprise. However, PMM was 20-30% more performant in quantum chemistry and only marginally better for astrophysics simulations. We also found, that for practical calculations hybrid setup demonstrates on the same order of magnitude performance as DDR4 system.