Time-to-Solution and Energy-to-Solution: A Comparison between ARM and Xeon

Abstract

Most High Performance Computing (HPC) systems today are known as "power hungry" because they aim at computing speed regardless to energy consumption. Some scientific applications still claim more speed and the community expects to reach exascale by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, to reach exascale we need to search alternatives to cope with energy constraints. A promising step forward in this direction is the usage of low power processors such as ARM. ARM processors target low power consumption in contrast with Xeon that are conventional on HPC aiming at computing speed. This paper presents a comparison between ARM and Xeon to evaluate if ARM is the future building block to HPC. We choose to use time-to-solution, peak power, and energy-to-solution to evaluate both processors from the user's perspective. The results point that although ARM having lower peak power, Xeon has still a better tradeoff from the user's point-of-view.