The electrical power consumption of current supercomputers has become the key limiting factor to successfully reach exascale. To further increase energy efficiency, the use of mobile system-on-chips (SoCs) has been proposed in the past. In this work we investigate four development boards equipped with different SoCs with respect to their suitability for HPC. Each of the boards is carefully benchmarked for high floating point computing performance, high memory bandwidth, low latencies, and power consumption, all of which we identified as key properties for successful HPC systems. In contrast to earlier work, we also include OpenCL-capable graphics processing units integrated in the SoC in our benchmarks.#R##N##R##N#Our benchmark results show that mobile SoCs are not ready for a successful adoption in HPC yet. While theoretical peak compute performance and memory bandwidth suggest SoCs to be a competitive with existing HPC systems, practical values are most of the time much lower. Therefore, none of the SoCs provides an attractive option for HPC in terms of lower acquisition costs or higher energy efficiency.
['Andreas Selinger', 'Karl Rupp', 'Siegfried Selberherr']
Evaluation of mobile ARM-based SoCs for high performance computing