Energy‐aware strategies for task‐parallel sparse linear system solvers

Abstract

We present several energy‐aware strategies to improve the energy efficiency of a task‐parallel preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) iterative solver on a Haswell‐EP Intel Xeon. These techniques leverage the power‐saving states of the processor, promoting the hardware into a more energy‐efficient C‐state and modifying the CPU frequency (P‐states of the processors) of some operations of the PCG. We demonstrate that the application of these strategies during the main operations of the iterative solver can reduce its energy consumption considerably, especially for memory‐bound computations.