Evaluation of Intel Max GPUs for CGYRO-based fusion simulations

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Intel Max GPUs for CGYRO fusion simulations, demonstrating comparable performance to other GPUs for small simulations and highlighting their relative speed advantages over CPUs.

Contribution

It provides the first benchmark comparison of Intel Max GPUs with other major HPC GPUs for CGYRO simulations, including necessary software adaptations.

Findings

Intel Max GPUs perform similarly to other GPUs on small simulations.

Intel Max GPUs are significantly faster than Intel Max CPUs on Stampede3.

Performance drops for larger simulations on Intel Max GPUs.

Abstract

Intel Max GPUs are a new option available to CGYRO fusion simulation users. This paper outlines the changes that were needed to successfully run CGYRO on Intel Max 1550 GPUs on TACC's Stampede3 HPC system and presents benchmark results obtained there. Benchmark results were also run on Stampede3 Intel Max CPUs, as well as NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI250X GPUs at other major HPC systems. The Intel Max GPUs are shown to perform comparably to the other tested GPUs for smaller simulations but are noticeably slower for larger ones. Moreover, Intel Max GPUs are significantly faster than the tested Intel Max CPUs on Stampede3.