Comparative analysis of HPC and accelerator devices: Computation, memory, I/O, and power

Abstract

The computing market constantly experiences the introduction of new devices, architectures, and enhancements to existing ones. Due to the number and diversity of processor and accelerator devices available, it is important to be able to objectively compare them based upon their capabilities regarding computation, I/O, power, and memory interfacing. This paper presents an extension to our existing suite of metrics to quantify additional characteristics of devices and highlight tradeoffs that exist between architectures and specific products. These metrics are applied to a large group of modern devices to evaluate their computational density, power consumption, I/O bandwidth, internal memory bandwidth, and external memory bandwidth.