Benchmarks Einstein@Home

[Dirk Broer]

Over the next months I will use this posting to publish my Einstein@Home benchmarks for the various SBCs in my possession. I will use this single posting, a 'work-in-progress' (WIP), to prevent spamming TSBT's forum completely, being a mere guest.

Einstein@Home has various apps suitable for ARM crunchers, such as the Apple-silicon-only Binary Radio Pulsar Search (Arecibo,GBT,A) (BRP4A), for both Apple M CPU (2.08 Apple_M-opencl) and Apple GPU (2.08 Apple_gpu-opencl). This will have to wait to be benchmarked by me until I have an Apple with a M CPU.

They also have Gamma-ray pulsar search #5 (FGRP5) for 64-bit ARM (1.16 beta test for SBCs, 1.14 for Apple MACs under ARM), and Binary Radio Pulsar Search (Arecibo,GBT) (BRP4) for no less than ten(!) ARM platforms -7 of which are under Android.
The remaining three are two Linux running on ARMv6 (armhf), one of which is optimized for NEON. I'd need my oldest Raspberry Pi in order to test that -and I might do that in order to see what OS version is the best, pure for the fun of it. The final one is BRP4 for 64-bit ARM.

So, in conclusion, I will test two Einstein@Home apps, on all but three of my ARM SBCs. This is because I experienced that the boards with less than 1GB per core tended to crash during running (The 2GB version of the quad-core Cortex-A57 Nvidia Jetson Nano, the 4GB hexa-core Odroid-N2+ running Armbian Linux and the 4GB hexa-core Radxa Rock Pi 4B+, running Armbian too). I will used a modified version of the utility of @davidbam because said utility is gone from the pages and will condense it to one line per test so that the eventual table will contain a wealth of comparable data in a very compact format.

Gamma-ray pulsar search #5 (FGRP5)

Board	Average Run Time in sec.	Average CPU Time in sec.	Credit per WU	Credit per Day/CPU	Credit per kWH
8GB Odroid-M1, Cortex-A55, 6.9W measured power draw, 4 WUs/CPU, running at 2000 MHz under Ubuntu 24.04	64,842	62,322	693	3,694	22,304
4GB Raspberry Pi 4, Cortex-A72, 7.2W estimated power draw, 4 WUs/CPU, running at 1800 MHz under Raspberry Pi OS Trixie	46,142	45,734	693	5,190	30,037
4GB Raspberry Pi 4, Cortex-A72, 11.0W estimated power draw, 4 WUs/CPU, running at 2000 MHz under Raspberry Pi OS Trixie	37,998	37,667	693	6,303	23,875

Binary Radio Pulsar Search (Arecibo,GBT) (BRP4)

Board	Average Run Time in sec.	Average CPU Time in sec.	Credit per WU	Credit per Day/CPU	Credit per kWH
8GB Odroid-M1, Cortex-A55, 6.9W measured power draw, 4 WUs/CPU	19,012	18,074	62	1,127	6,806

Two conclusions so far:

1. BRP4 doesn't pay well, Credits per KWh-wise
2. Overclocking might not be the most clever thing to do, budget-wise.

-to be continued.