GPU-Accelerated Molecular Dynamics: Energy Consumption and Performance

Energy consumption of hybrid systems is an actual problem of modern high-performance computing. The trade-off between power consumption and performance becomes more and more prominent. In this paper, we discuss the energy and power efficiency of two modern hybrid minicomputers Jetson TK1 and TX1. We use the Empirical Roofline Tool to obtain peak performance data and the molecular dynamics package LAMMPS as an example of a real-world benchmark. Using the precise wattmeter, we measure Jetsons power consumption profiles. The effectiveness of DVFS is examined as well. We determine the optimal GPU and DRAM frequencies that give the minimum energy-to-solution value.