Next-generation supercomputers will feature more hierarchical and
heterogeneous memory systems with different memory technologies working
side-by-side. A critical question is whether at large scale existing HPC
applications and emerging data-analytics workloads will have performance
improvement or degradation on these systems. We propose a systematic and fair
methodology to identify the trend of application performance on emerging
hybrid-memory systems. We model the memory system of next-generation
supercomputers as a combination of "fast" and "slow" memories. We then analyze
performance and dynamic execution characteristics of a variety of workloads,
from traditional scientific applications to emerging data analytics to compare
traditional and hybrid-memory systems. Our results show that data analytics
applications can clearly benefit from the new system design, especially at
large scale. Moreover, hybrid-memory systems do not penalize traditional
scientific applications, which may also show performance improvement.Comment: 18th International Conference on High Performance Computing and
Communications, IEEE, 201