Dell PowerEdge R820 - Manual (Page 6)

Performance Analysis of HPC Applications on Several Dell PowerEdge 12 th Generation Servers
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1. Introduction
The Dell PowerEdge 12 th generation server line up armed with the latest processors from Intel has been
well received by the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. The new servers provide more
choice than before; however, with these choices there is a need for quantitative recommendations and
guidelines to match an application’s requirements to the ideal cluster configuration. The latest Dell
servers can support the Intel
® Xeon ® processor E5-2400 product family, the Intel ® Xeon ® processor E5-
2600 product family, or the Intel ® Xeon ® processor E5-4600 product family, giving HPC users numerous
choices to configure a server for specific CPU, memory and I/O requirements. It is a daunting, although
necessary task for HPC users to understand the performance characteristics of each of these server
models to be able to make well-informed decisions regarding which server platform is best for their
purposes. This white paper analyses the performance and power consumption characteristics of these
server platforms at an application level to help HPC users make this choice with confidence.
The latest Dell PowerEdge 12 th generation servers include support for the new processors from Intel.
The PowerEdge M420 servers armed with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 product family cater to users
who need a dense compute intensive platform by accommodating 32 servers in 10 U rack space. This
allows 512 cores in 10 U, doubling the typical rack density. The 4 socket PowerEdge R820 servers tap
into the processing power of the Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family and provide massive
processing power and memory density. These characteristics are attractive to users who need fat nodes
in their clusters. Finally, the PowerEdge M620 server strikes a balance between performance, energy
efficiency, scalability, and density with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family.
This white paper describes the behavior of select HPC workloads on these three Intel Xeon processor
families with focus on performance and energy efficiency. The focus is on a cluster-level analysis as
opposed to a single-server study. The paper first introduces each of the three Intel architectures and
compares the three different processor families. It provides cluster-level results for different HPC
workloads. Subsequent sections analyze the results in order to provide better understanding and
recommendations regarding which type of server platform best fit a particular workload. The study
characterizes each server platform based not only on its performance but also on its energy efficiency.
The behavior and guidelines presented here apply to HPC workloads similar to those tested as part of
this study. The recommendations in this document may not be appropriate for general enterprise
workloads.
2. Dell PowerEdge 12
th
generation server platforms and Intel
processor architecture
A detailed comparison of the latest Intel processor architectural variants (Xeon E5-2400/E5-2600/4600,
architecture codenamed Sandy Bridge) is provided in Table 1. It also provides a comparison to the
previous generation Intel Xeon processor 5600 series (architecture codenamed Westmere). At a
glimpse, the major improvements on new Sandy Bridge based servers when compared to the previous
generation Westmere servers are the 33 percent increase in core count, increase in memory channels,
support for higher memory speeds and higher QPI speeds. A
previous study by the authors [1] describes
the Dell PowerEdge 12 th generation server models and the architecture of Sandy Bridge EP (Intel Xeon
processor E5-2600 product family) in great detail. It also explains the differences between Westmere-
EP and Sandy Bridge-EP at a more granular level. A block diagram of the Sandy Bridge EP processor
architecture is included in this document in Figure 1 as reference.