Energy-Delay-FIT Product to compare processors and algorithm implementations

We propose an extension to the Energy-Delay-Product (EDP) metric to compare different processors considering not only their energy consumption and execution time but also reliability. The Energy-Delay-FIT Product (EDFP) allows a pragmatic evaluation of the most suitable device to run an application. We consider three representative benchmarks and apply EDFP to compare Intel Xeon-Phi co-processors, NVIDIA K40 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and AMD Kaveri Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Our results show that HPC processors have higher power consumption and are more prone to be corrupted than APUs. However, the overall trade-off is attenuated by HPC processors efficiency, which makes them the most suitable candidates for the great majority of the considered applications. Additionally, we use EDFP to compare optimized and naive implementations of three benchmarks as executed on NVIDIA GPUs. Our results show that the naive implementation has generally better EDFP only for small input sizes while the optimized implementations are more efficient and reliable once the GPU resources are saturated.