Publications

P. Balaprakash, D. Buntinas, A. Chan, A. Guha, R. Gupta, S. H. K. Narayanan, A. A. Chien, P. Hovland, B. Norris, "Exascale Workload Characterization and Architecture Implications," Preprint ANL/MCS-P3013-0712, July 2012. [pdf]

We describe a hybrid methodology for characterizing scientific applications and apply it to proxy applications (mini-apps and PETSc applications) representative of the DOE's future high performance computing workloads. The methodology uses source code analysis, performance counters, and binary instrumentation to capture instruction mix and memory access patterns for a range of model-sized datasets.

With this empirical basis, we create statistical models that extrapolate application properties (instruction mix, memory size, and memory bandwidth) as a function of problem size. We validate these models empirically and use them to project the first quantitative characterization of an exascale computing workload, including computing and memory requirements. This exascale application extrapolation requires classification of applications as runtime or memory-capacity limited.

We evaluate the potential benefit of a radical new exa-scale architecture, stacked DRAM, and processing-under-memory (PUM). Our results show while the entire exascale workload is memory bandwidth limited, PUM-enabled tenfold increases in memory bandwidth can produce 1.4 to 4.2-fold speed improvements and convert the majority of these workloads to compute limited. Additionally, the programming effort required to exploit these PUM advantages appears to be low.