Performance of Popular HPC Applications on the Intel Knights Landing Platform

We present direct performance measurements for six popular HPC applications in the Knights Landing (KNL) platform. Performance numbers for Sandy Bridge and Haswell processors are provided for contrast. The applications (NAMD, Gromacs, FLASH4, WRF, Quantum Espresso and NCBI BLAST) were selected from among the ten most used in the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center as well as good representative of workloads used by large number of users and, given their diversity, should be representative of typical HPC workloads. All runs were performed with publicly available codes without modification – except a single line added to FLASH4 to enable threading in a given code section – and so results should be expected to improve as developers gain access to KNL. Current results are promising, with execution on a single KNL processor showing speedups up to 2.7X with respect to a dual socket Sandy Bridge and up to 1.7x with respect to a dual socket Haswell.