Evaluation of Mobile ARM-Based SoCs for High Performance Computing
Andreas Selinger, Karl Rupp, S. Selberherr · 2016
The electrical power consumption of current supercomputers has become the key limiting factor to successfully reach exascale. To further increase energy efficiency, the use of mobile system-on-chips (SoCs) has been proposed in the past. In this work we investigate four development boards equipped with different SoCs with respect to their suitability for HPC. Each of the boards is carefully benchmarked for high floating point computing performance, high memory bandwidth, low latencies, and power consumption, all of which we identified as key properties for successful HPC systems. In contrast to earlier work, we also include OpenCL-capable graphics processing units integrated in the SoC in our benchmarks.