Comparison of HPC Architectures for Computing All-Pairs Shortest Paths. Intel Xeon Phi KNL vs NVIDIA Pascal

Abstract

Today, one of the main challenges for high-performance computing systems is to improve their performance by keeping energy consumption at acceptable levels. In this context, a consolidated strategy consists of using accelerators such as GPUs or many-core Intel Xeon Phi processors. In this work, devices of the NVIDIA Pascal and Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing architectures are described and compared. Selecting the Floyd-Warshall algorithm as a representative case of graph and memory-bound applications, optimized implementations were developed to analyze and compare performance and energy efficiency on both devices. As it was expected, Xeon Phi showed superior when considering double-precision data. However, contrary to what was considered in our preliminary analysis, it was found that the performance and energy efficiency of both devices were comparable using single-precision datatype.