Most High Performance Computing (HPC) systems today are known as "power hungry" because they aim at computing speed regardless to energy consumption. Some scientific applications still claim more speed and the community expects to reach exascale by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, to reach exascale we need to search alternatives to cope with energy constraints. A promising step forward in this direction is the usage of low power processors such as ARM. ARM processors target low power consumption in contrast with Xeon that are conventional on HPC aiming at computing speed. This paper presents a comparison between ARM and Xeon to evaluate if ARM is the future building block to HPC. We choose to use time-to-solution, peak power, and energy-tosolution to evaluate both processors from the user's perspective. The results point that although ARM having lower peak power, Xeon has still a better tradeoff from the user's point-of-view.

International audiencePower consumption is one of the main challenges to achieve Exascale performance. Current research trends aim atovercoming power consumption constraints using low-power processors. Although new processors feature sensors that enableprecise power measurements, they provide different interfaces to collect data, making it difficult to correlate performance withenergy consumption. To overcome this issue, the authors developed a platform-independent tool that collects power andenergy data from homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. Using this tool, they provide a detailed comparison between alow-power processor (ARM big.LITTLE) and a high performance processor (Intel Sandy Bridge-EP) using all applicationsfrom the NAS parallel benchmarks and a real-world soil irrigation simulator. The results show that the average power demandof Intel Sandy Bridge-EP is within 12.6× to 152.4× higher than ARM big.LITTLE, whereas its average energy consumptionis within 1.6× to 7.1× superior. Overall, ARM big.LITTLE presented a better performance/energy trade-off when it takes<9.2× the execution time of Intel Sandy Bridge-EP to solve the same problem

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