2014 Hardware-Software Co-Design for High Performance Computing (Co-HPC)
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Abstract

A growing number of supercomputers are being built using processors with low-power embedded ancestry, rather than traditional high-performance cores. In order to evaluate this approach we investigate the energy and performance tradeoffs found with ten different 32-bit ARM development boards while running the HPL Linpack and STREAM benchmarks.Based on these results (and other practical concerns) we chose the Raspberry Pi as a basis for a power-aware embedded cluster computing testbed. Each node of the cluster is instrumented with power measurement circuitry so that detailed cluster-wide power measurements can be obtained, enabling power / performance co-design experiments.While our cluster lags recent x86 machines in performance, the power, visualization, and thermal features make it an excellent low-cost platform for education and experimentation.
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