Performance analysis of emerging data analytics and HPC workloads

Abstract

Supercomputers are increasingly being used to run a data analytics workload in addition to a traditional simulation science workload. This mixed workload must be rigorously characterized to ensure that appropriately balanced machines are deployed. In this paper we analyze a suite of applications representing the simulation science and data workload at the NERSC supercomputing center. We show how time is spent in application compute, library compute, communication and I/O, and present application performance on both the Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon-Phi partitions of the Cori supercomputer. We find commonality in the libraries used, I/O motifs and methods of parallelism, and obtain similar node-to-node performance for the base application configurations. We demonstrate that features of the Intel Xeon-Phi node architecture and a Burst Buffer can improve application performance, providing evidence that an exascale-era energy-efficient platform can support a mixed workload.