The Gauss Award is sponsored by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), which is a collaboration of the German national supercomputing centers at Garching, Jülich and Stuttgart. The winner receives a cash prize of 3,000€, courtesy of the Gauss Center, which is traditionally presented during the ISC Conference’s Opening Session. This year, our paper, which was the result of a joint effort between the Chair for Computer Architecture and the HPC group at the computing center (RRZE) of FAU, was selected as the winner by the Gauss Award committee:
Johannes Hofmann, Georg Hager, and Dietmar Fey: On the Accuracy and Usefulness of Analytic Energy Models for Contemporary Multicore Processors
The contributions we make in the paper are as follows. First, we propose a refinement to the execution-cache-memory (ECM) model, which corrects the model’s multi-core estimates for many-core processors by taking contention for shared resources into account. Secondly, we present analytic power and energy models for steady-state codes. These models take all relevant chip parameters into account and are capable of delivering high-quality estimates for scalable and saturating codes. Finally, we use the presented models and empirical data to improve the community’s understanding about processors’ power and energy properties by identifying governing principles and universal behavior across different architectures.
The full paper, covering Intel and AMD processors, is available here. A publicly available pre-print, which does not include results for AMD’s Epyc CPU, can be found here.