Evaluation of Low Power ARM Processors for Monte Carlo Particle Transport: MCNP6 on the ARM Cortex-A8 - Paper 83
In the push towards exascale computing, the limiting factors are power requirements and heat dissipation. Using current technology, the power required to drive an exascale supercomputer would near 400-MW. Clearly, future computing hardware will have to be more energy efficient in order to achieve exascale performance. Most of the current research in advanced computing architectures is in the use of standard CPUs with accelerators. However, these accelerators are not generally supported by the traditional scientific programming languages (C, C++, and Fortran) and the scientific software must be tailored specifically to take advantage of the accelerators. Large scale scientific software (hundreds-of-thousand to millions of lines of code) can not be easily ported to the computing platform du jour. The widespread use of low power ARM based processors in the mobile computing market offer a low power alternative to accelerators that are also supported by the traditional scientific programming languages and programming paradigms such as MPI and OpenMP. Computing architectures for scientific computing are often assessed using standard benchmarks such as LINPACK benchmark or using suites of mini-applications that are greatly simplified stand-ins for scientific software. Often the real applications that will deployed on the scientific supercomputers are not ported or tested until delivery of the machines. In order to evaluate the use of ARM processors for scientific computing the Monte Carlo particle transport code, MCNP version 6 was compiled on the ARM Cortex-A8 and a set of benchmark problems were used to assess performance in comparison to an Intel Xeon E5-2670 and the low power Intel Atom N270. MCNP is a continuous energy Monte Carlo particle transport code in development at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1977. MCNP is used to transport neutrons, photon, electrons, and charged particles using continuous energy interaction data. It is commonly used in fields of nuclear power, nuclear medicine, radiation protection, and high-energy physics through-out the world. MCNP version 6 is approximately 450 thousand lines of code, written primary in Fortran90, with some C and C++. MCNP supports distributed multiprocessing using MPI and threading with OpenMP. The ARM Cortex-A8 executes MCNP6 using about twice as much power as the Intel Xeon E5-2670 and about the same amount of power as the Intel Atom N270. However, these results are encouraging for the use of low-power ARM chips in future supercomputers. The ARM Cortex-A8 is a 32-bit CPU and it's NEON general-purpose SIMD (single-instruction multiple data) engine does not support double-precision floating-point arithmetic. More recent ARM processors (ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57) support 64-bit addressing and have NEON co-processors that support double-precision floating-point arithmetic. ARM claims that the A50 series delivers a performance increase of 15 times the Cortex-A8 performance for similar power usage. (authors)