Comparing the Performance and Power Usage of GPU and ARM Clusters for Map-Reduce

This paper compares two parallel architectures, the GPU and the integrated ARM cluster, for the execution of map-reduce applications. The comparison targets performance and power usage. The increasing importance of energy efficiency, especially for large distributed systems - such as frequently used for map-reduce - motivates the comparison of alternative parallel architectures. Because the different hardware platforms require specific map-reduce implementations, we selected two different implementations and showed that GPU provides a better performance per watt than ARM cluster, but by less than an order of magnitude. These results indicate the great potential of ARM clusters, given the differences in hardware and software between the alternatives.