A64FX – Your Compiler You Must Decide!

The current number one of the TOP500 list, Supercomputer Fugaku, has demonstrated that CPU-only HPC systems aren’t dead and CPUs can be used for more than just being the host controller for a discrete accelerators. While the specifications of the chip and overall system architecture, and benchmarks submitted to various lists, like TOP500 and Green500, etc., are clearly highlighting the potential, the proliferation of Arm into the HPC business is rather recent and hence the software stack might not be fully matured and tuned, yet. We test 3 state-of-the-art compiler suite against a broad set of benchmarks. Our measurements show that orders of magnitudes in performance can be gained by deviating from the recommended usage model of the A64FX compute nodes.