Time and Energy to Solution Evaluation for the Three-Point Angular Correlation Function

This paper analyzes the performance of different implementations of a three-point angular correlation function. This function is used in the study of large scale distribution of galaxies in a variety of computational platforms. The function is based on histogram construction and presents a large computational cost. This cost dramatically increases with the size of the datasets. The implementation presents several challenges depending of the target platform that need to be addressed to achieve the best possible performance. We have considered two different GPUs, a set of x86 Intel machines (multi- and many-core), as well as an FPGA. We first study the best possible implementation for each platform in terms of time to solution. We then compare the power used by those platforms for a predefined number of datasets. Energy is one of the main constraints that computer architects are facing nowadays. The results will be used to evaluate the performance of this function considering those two targets - time and energy - for those platforms and to analyze the suitability of each of those platforms for this specific problem.