Energy and Performance Characteristics of Different Parallel Implementations of Scientific Applications on Multicore Systems

Energy consumption is a major concern with high performance multicore systems. In this paper, the authors explore the energy consumption and performance (execution time) characteristics of different parallel implementations of scientific applications. In particular, the experiments focus on Message-Passing Interface (MPI)-only versus hybrid MPI/OpenMP implementations for hybrid NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) BT (Block Tridiagonal) benchmark (strong scaling), a Lattice Boltzmann application (strong scaling), and a Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code - GTC (weak scaling), as well as CPU frequency scaling.