Low Power High Performance Computing on Arm System-on-Chip in Astrophysics

In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on the energy consumption on Arm MPSoC platforms, exploiting both CPUs and embedded GPUs. Performance and energy measures are made on a direct N-body code, a real scientific application from the astrophysical domain. The time-to-solutions, energy-to-solutions and energy delay product using different software configurations are compared with those obtained on a general purpose x86 desktop and PCIe GPGPU. With this work, we investigate the possibility of using commodity single boards based on Arm MPSoC as an HPC computational resource for real Astrophysical production runs. Our results show to which extent those boards can be used and which modification are necessary to a production code to profit of them. A crucial finding of this work is the effect of the emulated double precision on the GPU performances that allow to use embedded and gaming GPUs as excellent HPC resources