A Taste of Scientific Computing on the GPU-Accelerated Edge Device

Abstract

The computing power provided by the edge device is becoming increasingly improved in recent days, largely due to the technological development that realizes accelerators with a great amount of hardware parallelism. Thanks to the enhanced computing power, the application domain of the edge device is greatly expanding so that it is capable of performing new tasks previously inconceivable. In this paper, we investigate the potentials of the state-of-the-art edge devices in the context of scientific computing. We implement and perform stochastic biochemical simulation on a small cluster of modern, GPU-accelerated edge systems to examine the computational capability of the device. In addition, we perform and analyze the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) performance on the edge device. By comparing the performance of the edge device with other GPU (graphics processing unit) and CPU based systems across different platforms, we evaluate the applicability and usefulness of the modern hardware-accelerated edge devices in the scientific computing domain.

Keywords

• Edge computing
• scientific computing
• GPU (graphics processing unit)