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Characterizing GPU Energy Usage in Exascale-Ready Portable Science Applications

Published: May 8, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2505.05623v2

By: William F. Godoy , Oscar Hernandez , Paul R. C. Kent and more

Potential Business Impact:

Saves energy on supercomputers by using less precise numbers.

Business Areas:
Quantum Computing Science and Engineering

We characterize the GPU energy usage of two widely adopted exascale-ready applications representing two classes of particle and mesh solvers: (i) QMCPACK, a quantum Monte Carlo package, and (ii) AMReXCastro, an adaptive mesh astrophysical code. We analyze power, temperature, utilization, and energy traces from double-/single (mixed)-precision benchmarks on NVIDIA's A100 and H100 and AMD's MI250X GPUs using queries in NVML and rocm_smi_lib, respectively. We explore application-specific metrics to provide insights on energy vs. performance trade-offs. Our results suggest that mixed-precision energy savings range between 6-25% on QMCPACK and 45% on AMReX-Castro. Also, we found gaps in the AMD tooling used on Frontier GPUs that need to be understood, while query resolutions on NVML have little variability between 1 ms-1 s. Overall, application level knowledge is crucial to define energy-cost/science-benefit opportunities for the codesign of future supercomputer architectures in the post-Moore era.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
13 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Performance