Benchmarking Parallel Performance on Many-Core Processors

With the emergence of many-core processor architectures onto the HPC scene, concerns arise regarding the performance and productivity of numerous existing parallel-programming tools, models, and languages. As these devices begin augmenting conventional distributed cluster systems in an evolving age of heterogeneous supercomputing, proper evaluation and profiling of many-core processors must occur in order to understand their performance and architectural strengths with existing parallel-programming environments and HPC applications. This paper presents and evaluates the comparative performance between two many-core processors, the Tilera TILE-Gx8036 and the Intel Xeon Phi 5110P, in the context of their applications performance with the SHMEM and OpenMP parallel-programming environments. Several applications written or provided in SHMEM and OpenMP are evaluated in order to analyze the scalability of existing tools and libraries on these many-core platforms. Our results show that SHMEM and OpenMP parallel applications scale well on the TILE-Gx and Xeon Phi, but heavily depend on optimized libraries and instrumentation.