A performance evaluation of the Kunpeng 920 cluster in benchmarks and HPC applications
Tao Hu, Peizhen Li, Yang Zhang, Wenbo Chen · 2023
ARM architecture has shown potential performance in HPC applications, as demonstrated by the Fugaku supercomputer's ranking in the TOP500 in 2020. This paper explored the performance advantages of the Kunpeng 920 cluster made by the Huawei company. STREAM, HPL, and HPCG benchmarks are chosen for our evaluation. Additionally, this paper used novel HPC packages such as the BiSheng compiler, Hyper MPI communication library, and Kunpeng KML math library developed by Huawei. And they are adopted by 10 HPC applications from the Molecular Dynamics, Meteorology, and Life Sciences fields, including GROMACS, CP2K, LAMMPS, AmberTools, WRF, NEMO, CESM, FALCON, BWA, and PASA. The HPC applications are used to evaluate the computing performance and scalability of the Kunpeng 920 cluster. And this paper compared the results with those of the x86 cluster consisting of Intel Xeon Gold 6248. The results show that the Kunpeng 920 cluster has 27.9% higher memory bandwidth and better computing efficiency than the x86 cluster in benchmarks. Most of the HPC applications on the Kunpeng 920 cluster have better computing performance than the x86 cluster, to varying degrees.