Seminar DCSY - Nikl V.: High Performance Computing on Low Power Devices

Nowadays, the power efficiency of modem processors is becoming more and more important next to the overall performance itself. In order to reach the Exascale era,   much more energy-efficient hardware will have to be utilized. The same goes for software appplications. Many programming tasks and problems do not scale very well with higher number of cores due to being memory or communication-bound, therefore it is often not beneficial to use faster chips to achieve better runtimes. In this case, employing more efficient low power processors or accelerators and using static and dynamic techniques for hardware efficiency adaptation may be much more beneficial, mainly because it is possible to get the same results using much less energy and often without any significant performance penalties, given the algorithm is suitable for the low power architecture.