Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems

12:00 - 12:30 Best Paper
Ponte Vecchio Across the Atlantic: Single-Node Benchmarking of Two Intel GPU Systems

Thomas Applencourt, Servesh Muralidharan, Colleen Bertoni, Jae-Hyuk Kwack, Ye Luo, Esteban Rangel, John Tramm, Yasaman Ghadar
Argonne National Laboratory, USA

Aditya Sadawarte, Tom Deakin
University of Bristol, UK

Arjen Tamerus, Chris Edsall
University of Cambridge, UK

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 TOP500 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 an MI250.