Title :
Low power high-performance computingon the Beagleboard platform
Author :
Principi, E. ; Colagiacomo, V. ; Squartini, S. ; Piazza, F.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Inf. Eng., Univ. Politec. delle Marche, Ancona, Italy
Abstract :
The ever increasing energy requirements of supercomputers and server farms is driving the scientific and industrial communities to take in deeper consideration the energy efficiency of computing equipments. This contribution addresses the issue proposing a cluster of ARM processors for high performance computing. The cluster is composed of five BeagleBoard-xM, with one board managing the cluster, and the other boards executing the actual processing. The software platform is based on the Angstrom GNU/Linux distribution and is equipped with a distributed file system to ease sharing data and code among the nodes of the cluster, and with tools for managing tasks and monitoring the status of each node. The computational capabilities of the cluster have been assessed through High-Performance Linpack and a cluster-wide speaker diarization algorithm, while power consumption has been measured using a clamp meter. Experimental results obtained in the speaker diarization task showed that the energy efficiency of the BeagleBoard-xM cluster is comparable to the one of a laptop computer equipped with a Intel Core2 Duo T8300 running at 2.4 GHz. Furthermore, removing the bottleneck due to the Ethernet interface, the BeagleBoard-xM cluster is able to achieve a superior energy efficiency.
Keywords :
Linux; microprocessor chips; network operating systems; parallel processing; ARM processor; Angstrom GNU; Beagleboard platform; Ethernet interface; Intel Core2 Duo T8300; Linux distribution; clamp meter; cluster-wide speaker diarization algorithm; computing equipment; distributed file system; energy efficiency; high performance computing; high-performance linpack; laptop computer; power consumption; server farm; supercomputer;
Conference_Titel :
Education and Research Conference (EDERC), 2012 5th European DSP
Conference_Location :
Amsterdam
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-4595-8
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4673-4595-8
DOI :
10.1109/EDERC.2012.6532220