Benchmarking Energy Efficiency, Power Costs and Carbon Emissions on Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

With the advent of heterogeneous computing systems consisting of multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and many-core graphics processing units (GPUs), robust methods are needed to facilitate fair benchmark comparisons between different systems. In this paper, we present a benchmarking methodology for measuring a number of performance metrics for heterogeneous systems. Methods for comparing performance and energy efficiency are included. Consideration is given to further metrics, such as associated running costs and carbon emissions. We give a case study for these metrics applied to Bristol University Docking engine, a molecular mechanics-based docking application that has been ported to open computing language at the University of Bristol. Results are included for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, and for a highly optimized code on the latest x86 CPUs.