Performance/energy trade-off in scientific computing: the case of ARM big.LITTLE and Intel Sandy Bridge

International audiencePower consumption is one of the main challenges to achieve Exascale performance. Current research trends aim atovercoming power consumption constraints using low-power processors. Although new processors feature sensors that enableprecise power measurements, they provide different interfaces to collect data, making it difficult to correlate performance withenergy consumption. To overcome this issue, the authors developed a platform-independent tool that collects power andenergy data from homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. Using this tool, they provide a detailed comparison between alow-power processor (ARM big.LITTLE) and a high performance processor (Intel Sandy Bridge-EP) using all applicationsfrom the NAS parallel benchmarks and a real-world soil irrigation simulator. The results show that the average power demandof Intel Sandy Bridge-EP is within 12.6× to 152.4× higher than ARM big.LITTLE, whereas its average energy consumptionis within 1.6× to 7.1× superior. Overall, ARM big.LITTLE presented a better performance/energy trade-off when it takes