Evaluation of Performance and Power Consumption on Supercomputer Fugaku using SPEC HPC benchmarks

Abstract

The supercomputer, “Fugaku”, which ranked number one in multiple supercomputing lists, including the Top500 in June 2020, has various power control features, such as (1) an eco mode that utilizes only one of two floating-point pipelines while decreasing the power supply to the chip; (2) a boost mode that increases clock frequency; and (3) a core retention feature that turns unused cores to the low-power state. By orchestrating these power-performance features while considering the characteristics of running applications, we can potentially gain even better system-level energy efficiency. In this paper, we report on the performance and power consumption of Fugaku using SPEC HPC benchmarks. Consequently, we confirmed that it is possible to reduce the energy by about 17% while improving the performance by about 2% from the normal mode by combining boost mode and eco mode.