NVIDIA Grace Superchip Early Evaluation for HPC Applications

Arm-based system in HPC are a reality since more than a decade. However, when a new chip enters the market always implies challenges, not only at ISA level, but also with regards to the SoC integration, the memory subsystem, the board integration, the node interconnection, and finally the OS and all layers of the system software (compiler and libraries). Guided by the procurement of an NVIDIA Grace HPC cluster within the deployment of MareNostrum 5, and emulating the approach of a scientist who needs to migrate its scientific research to a new HPC system, we evaluated five complex scientific applications on engineering sample nodes of NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip (CPU-only). We report intra-node and inter-node scalability and early performance results showing a speed-up between 1.3 × and 4.28 × for all codes when compared to the current generation of MareNostrum 4 powered by Intel Skylake CPUs.