Ponte Vecchio Across the Atlantic: Single-Node Benchmarking of Two Intel GPU Systems

Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550, known as Ponte Vecchio (PVC), is a new Intel GPU architecture for high-performance computing. It is the basis of two systems on the June 2024 Top 500 list, Dawn (#51) and Aurora (#2).This work provides micro-benchmarking data on PVCs from which application developers may benefit, shows how the micro-benchmarking results are indicative of mini-app performance on PVC, and demonstrates real applications on large-scale Intel GPU systems.We quantify the obtainable performance from PVC systems through micro-benchmarking fundamental architectural properties. We evaluate the performance of four mini-apps with known performance characteristics, and two full applications, comparing performance on a node of Aurora and Dawn with a node of NVIDIA H100 GPUs and a node of AMD MI250 GPUs. We show the figure-of-merit of the mini-apps on a single PVC ranges from 0.6–1.8X the performance of an H100, and 0.8–7.5X of a MI250.