Unveiling the Performance-energy Trade-off in Iterative Linear System Solvers for Multithreaded Processors

TitleUnveiling the Performance-energy Trade-off in Iterative Linear System Solvers for Multithreaded Processors
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2014
AuthorsAliaga, J. I., H. Anzt, M. Castillo, J. C. Fernández, G. León, J. Pérez, and E. S. Quintana-Orti
JournalConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
Volume27
Issue4
Start Page885
Pagination885-904
Date Published2014-09
KeywordsCG, CPUs, energy efficiency, GPUs, low-power architectures
AbstractIn this paper, we analyze the interactions occurring in the triangle performance-power-energy for the execution of a pivotal numerical algorithm, the iterative conjugate gradient (CG) method, on a diverse collection of parallel multithreaded architectures. This analysis is especially timely in a decade where the power wall has arisen as a major obstacle to build faster processors. Moreover, the CG method has recently been proposed as a complement to the LINPACK benchmark, as this iterative method is argued to be more archetypical of the performance of today's scientific and engineering applications. To gain insights about the benefits of hands-on optimizations we include runtime and energy efficiency results for both out-of-the-box usage relying exclusively on compiler optimizations, and implementations manually optimized for target architectures, that range from general-purpose and digital signal multicore processors to manycore graphics processing units, all representative of current multithreaded systems.
URLhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.3341
DOI10.1002/cpe.3341
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