Benchmarking the IBM Power8 processor

This paper discusses the performance of IBM's Power8 CPUs, on a number of skeleton, financial and CFD benchmarks and applications. Implicitly, the performance of the software toolchain is also tested - the bare-bones Little-Endian Ubuntu, the XL compilers and OpenMP runtimes. First, we aim to establish some roofline numbers on bandwidth and compute throughput, then move on to benchmark explicit and implicit one-/three-factor Black-Scholes computations, and CFD applications based on the OP2 and OPS frameworks, such as Airfoil, CloverLeaf, CloverLeaf 3D. These applications all exhibit different characteristics in terms of computations, communications, memory access patterns, etc. Both absolute and relative performance metrics are computed and compared to NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Xeon CPUs.