A comparative study of application performance and scalability on the Intel knights landing processor

Abstract

Intel Knights Landing represents a qualitative change in the Many Integrated Core architecture. It represents a self-hosted option and includes a high speed integrated memory together with a two dimensional mesh used to interconnect the cores. This leads to a number of possible runtime configurations with different characteristics and implications in the performance of applications. This paper presents a study of the performance differences observed when using the three MCDRAM configurations available in combination with the three possible memory access or cluster modes. We analyze the effects that memory affinity and process pinning have on different applications. The Mantevo suite of mini applications and NAS Parallel Benchmarks are used to analyze the behavior of very different application kernels, from molecular dynamics to CFD mini-applications. Two full applications, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) application and a Lattice Boltzman Suite (LBS3D) are also analyzed in detail to complete the study and present scalability results of a variety of applications.