How many cores do we need to run a parallel workload: A test drive of the Intel SCC platform?

As semiconductor manufacturing technology continues to improve, it is possible to integrate more and more transistors onto a single processor. Many-core processor design has resulted in part from the search to utilize this enormous transistor real estate. The Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is an experimental many-core processor created by Intel Labs. In this paper we present a study in which we analyze this innovative many-core system by running several workloads with distinctive parallelism characteristics. We investigate the effect on system performance by monitoring specific hardware performance counters. Then, we experiment on varying different hardware configuration parameters such as number of cores, clock frequency and voltage levels. We execute the chosen workloads and collect the timing, power consumption and energy consumption information on such a many-core research platform. Thus, we can comprehensively analyze the behavior and scalability of the Intel SCC system with the introduced workload in terms of performance and energy consumption. Our results show that the profiled parallel workload execution has a communication bottleneck on the Intel SCC system. Moreover, our results indicate that we should carefully choose the number of cores to execute different workloads in order to yield a balance between execution performance and energy efficiency for different applications. Email addresses: [email protected] (Chen Liu), [email protected] (Pollawat Thanarungroj), [email protected] (Jean-Luc Gaudiot) Preprint submitted to Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing December 25, 2013