Node-Level Performance and Energy Characterization of Flagship Science Applications on SuperMUC-NG Phase 2
Abstract
We present a systematic performance and energy-efficiency characterization of five flagship scientific workloads on SuperMUC-NG phase 2, the 28 PetaFLOPs system at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) equipped with Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ and Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550 (Ponte Vecchio, PVC) accelerators. The selected codes span molecular dynamics (gromacs, lammps), astrophysics and cosmology (OpenGadget3, AthenaK), and finite-element PDE solvers from the dealii-X Center of Excellence. For each code we measure throughput and energy efficiency expressed as compute-elements per wall-clock second (or per Joule of consumed energy) on a single compute node, comparing CPU-only (SPR) against combined CPU+GPU (SPR+PVC) configurations where available. Energy measurements rely on lightweight code instrumentation with p3em, or the Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) present on the system. Our results show that GPU offload yields 4-12× higher throughput and up to 15× better energy efficiency compared to CPU-only execution, with lammps and AthenaK benefiting most. However, both throughput and energy gains are sensitive to problem granularity: insufficient work per GPU tile erodes the accelerator advantage, as clearly observed in AthenaK at small mesh-block sizes. The power-budget utilization is systematically lower for CPUs than it is for GPUs, indicating that even at peak useful-work rate, most applications running on CPUs leave a significant fraction of the node's thermal envelope unused.
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