Power and performance characteristics of CORAL Scalable Science Benchmarks on BlueGene/Q Mira

The CORAL Scalable Science Benchmarks are full applications that are expected to test the full scale of future CORAL systems. It is important to better understand power and performance characteristics of these benchmarks before using them to test future CORAL systems. In this paper we have an in-depth analysis of power and performance characteristics of the Scalable Science Benchmarks Nekbone, HACC and Qbox on a power-aware BlueGene/Q supercomputer Mira at Argonne National Laboratory, which is one of three DoE reference production systems. Experimental results show that using these Scalable Science Benchmarks to test future CORAL systems requires serious consideration of different system configurations and implementations for the high performance and low energy consumption. In addition, performance counters are used to analyze potential optimization focuses of these benchmarks.