Investigations of Multi-socket High Core Count RISC-V for HPC Workloads

Whilst RISC-V has become popular in fields such as embedded computing, it is yet to find mainstream success in High Performance Computing (HPC).However, the 64-core RISC-V Sophon SG2042 is a potential game changer as it provides a commodity available CPU with much higher core count than existing technologies.In this work we benchmark the SG2042 CPU hosted in an experimental, dual-socket, system to explore the performance properties of the CPU when running a common HPC benchmark suite across sockets.Earlier benchmarks found that, on the Milk-V Pioneer workstation, whilst the SG2042 performs well for compute bound codes, it struggles when pressure is placed on the memory subsystem.The performance results reported here confirm that, even on a different system, these memory performance limitations are still present and hence inherent in the CPU.However, a multi-socket configuration does enable the CPU to scale to a larger number of threads which, in the main, delivers an improvement in performance and-so this is a realistic system configuration for the HPC community.