Live Webcast 15th Annual Charm++ Workshop

To achieve the best performance and energy efficiency, HPC applications may require tuning on new architectures like Knights Landing, Intel’s 2nd generation Xeon Phi processor. Furthermore, different applications with varying characteristics might benefit from variant configurations and tuning. In order to study the different types of applications, we select a molecular dynamics kernel, LeanMD and Stencil3D code from the Charm++ benchmark suite, which are representative of compute and communication intensive HPC benchmarks, respectively. We analyze these applications on different KNL configurations, namely MCDRAM usage mode for a given cluster mode and perform within node optimizations, specifically use of hyperthreading and enabling CPU affinity. With this tuning of applications based on their characteristics, we show a performance improvement of over 1.7X when enabling hyperthreading and energy savings of nearly 10%.