Research on the Influence of CPU Power Management on the Performance of Parallel FDTD

To explore the effects of CPU new technologies on parallel computation on a PC cluster, the parallel Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) is taken as a sample, and the power management (PowerNow, Turbo Core) is investigated by a set of numerical experiments on a PC cluster with 8-core AMD Fx-8120 CPUs. The results demonstrate that these technologies exhibit quite different impacts on the parallel FDTD. PowerNow can considerably drop the parallel efficiency in some specific operations such as inter-process communication. Turbo Core accelerates the computation in low CPU usage