Achieving HPC Performance with Xeon 6 Processors
In HPC circles, the discussion often revolves around achieving “peak FLOPS.” And while compute is unquestionably important to high performance computing, many HPC applications including scientific simulation, graph analytics, finite element modeling are actually memory-bound. Compute waits for data. That’s where Xeon 6 processor architecture, and it’s support for scalable memory, shines.
I recently met with a national lab team whose spectral simulation scaled beautifully to 128 nodes, but performance flattened beyond 128 because memory bandwidth per core collapsed. Their compute was starving, waiting for data that was slow to arrive. While it would be tempting to throw more flops at the problem, the more elegant solution to their compute constraint was delivery of a balance of compute, interconnect, and memory performance.
Luckily, we’ve designed today’s Xeon CPUs for this balanced performance. In the Xeon 6 processor family, the architecture supports both P-cores (for compute) and E-cores (for throughput) on a unified I/O and memory interface, providing computing environments found in the HPC arena the flexibility they crave. That shared fabric ensures that memory bottlenecks don’t isolate execution to narrow lanes, delivering data effectively to meet compute requirements.
How do we accomplish it? It starts with high throughput memory channels and large cache hierarchies, essentially reducing memory contention within the system. We extend this with a NUMA design, carefully tuned, ensuring that parallel tasks see minimal cross-node memory latency. We layer on low-latency coherence paths, essential to multi-socket configurations found in HPC platforms, and multi-workload support mixing compute, data staging, and I/O including checkpointing and data orchestration. This removes the opportunity for non-compute tasks to gate total workload performance.
The Path Ahead
Do Xeon 6 processors make sense for your HPC configuration? Evaluate your workload requirements, and assess if you’re gated by memory-bound application constraints. I think you’ll discover that the balanced system performance delivered by our latest generation of processors can change the game for compute delivery, making them a solid foundation for HPC deployments.
In HPC circles, the discussion often revolves around achieving “peak FLOPS.” And while compute is unquestionably important to high performance computing, many HPC applications including scientific simulation, graph analytics, finite element modeling are actually memory-bound. Compute waits for data. That’s where Xeon 6 processor architecture, and it’s support for scalable memory, shines.
I recently met with a national lab team whose spectral simulation scaled beautifully to 128 nodes, but performance flattened beyond 128 because memory bandwidth per core collapsed. Their compute was starving, waiting for data that was slow to arrive. While it would be tempting to throw more flops at the problem, the more elegant solution to their compute constraint was delivery of a balance of compute, interconnect, and memory performance.
Luckily, we’ve designed today’s Xeon CPUs for this balanced performance. In the Xeon 6 processor family, the architecture supports both P-cores (for compute) and E-cores (for throughput) on a unified I/O and memory interface, providing computing environments found in the HPC arena the flexibility they crave. That shared fabric ensures that memory bottlenecks don’t isolate execution to narrow lanes, delivering data effectively to meet compute requirements.
How do we accomplish it? It starts with high throughput memory channels and large cache hierarchies, essentially reducing memory contention within the system. We extend this with a NUMA design, carefully tuned, ensuring that parallel tasks see minimal cross-node memory latency. We layer on low-latency coherence paths, essential to multi-socket configurations found in HPC platforms, and multi-workload support mixing compute, data staging, and I/O including checkpointing and data orchestration. This removes the opportunity for non-compute tasks to gate total workload performance.
The Path Ahead
Do Xeon 6 processors make sense for your HPC configuration? Evaluate your workload requirements, and assess if you’re gated by memory-bound application constraints. I think you’ll discover that the balanced system performance delivered by our latest generation of processors can change the game for compute delivery, making them a solid foundation for HPC deployments.
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