Performance evaluation of the three-point angular correlation function

Abstract

In recent years, we have observed an increase in the diversity of the processors ecosystem. Different designs and architectures are being studied based on their performance and power characteristics. While using benchmarks for this purpose allows for reproducibility and easy understanding of the results, using real scientific applications allows researchers to realize the actual implications of each design on the overall performance of their codes. This paper analyzes the performance of different implementations of a three-point angular correlation function. This function is used in the study of Large-Scale Distribution of galaxies in a variety of computational platforms. The function is based on histogram construction and presents a large computational cost. This cost dramatically increases with the size of the datasets. We have considered two different GPUs, a set of x86 Intel machines (multi- and many-core), ARM chipsets, as well as an FPGA. We first study the best possible implementation for each platform in terms of time to solution. We then compare the power used by those platforms for a predefined number of datasets. Energy is one of the main constraints that computer architects are facing nowadays. The results will be used to evaluate the performance of this function considering those two targets – time and energy – for those platforms and to analyze the suitability of each of those platforms for this specific problem.