Dell PowerEdge 1655MC - Manual (Page 15)

Optimal BIOS settings for HPC with Dell PowerEdge 12 th generation servers
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Table 5. Benchmark and application details
Application Domain Version Benchmark data set
High Performance
Linpack Floating point CPU intensive
system benchmark Intel MKL
v10.3.9.293 NA, all problems consumed
90% of total memory.
Stream Memory Bandwidth micro-
benchmark v5.9 Array size 160000000
ANSYS Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics
application v14.0.0 truck_poly_14m and
truck_111m
WRF Weather modeling application v3.1 Conus 12k
NAMD Molecular Dynamics application v2.9 Stmv
MILC Quantum Chromo dynamics
application v7.6.3 Input file from Intel Corp.
LU
Lower-upper decomposition,
physical systems
NPB v3.3.1 Class D
As mentioned, this study is focused on a cluster-level evaluation. Some single server results are
available in this
blog post .
The applications picked for this study are a mix of synthetic benchmarks and commercial applications
selected to be representative across a range of HPC domains.
For all applications except HPL, performance is measured in terms of “Rating”. Rating determines how
many times the application can run in a day. It is computed as (number of seconds in a 24-hour day/
Time to run in seconds). This allows us to compare the impact to different applications on the same
graph. HPL performance is reported in terms of GFLOPS.
Power consumption was measured by connecting the 16-server blade chassis to a rack power
distribution unit (PDU). The power measurements therefore include the power consumption of the
InfiniBand network infrastructure as well. The PDU recorded current (Ampere) usage over time, and
this value was averaged over the course of the test run to determine the power consumption in Watts.
Energy efficiency is reported as a ratio of Performance per Watt.
5. Results and analysis
This section presents the results of the tests conducted as part of this study. Presented first are results
for idle power usage across the different System Profiles. Each subsequent section discusses the impact
of a specific BIOS option on performance and energy efficiency.
Any BIOS options that were tuned specifically for the study are listed with each section. Options that
are not explicitly mentioned were set to Dell defaults.