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Figure 3 shows the power consumption results of running NAMD for the runs in Figure 2.
As shown, the power consumption for quad GPU configurations is about 2.1X to 2.3X resulting in accelerations
from 4.4X to 7.8X. Configuration “C” does the best from performance per watt perspective (an acceleration of
7.8X for 2.3X more power). The power consumption of “D” is higher than “E” due to higher due to the additional
CPU and improved utilization of GPUs resulting in better acceleration.
In conclusion, first, using K80 GPUs can substantially accelerate NAMD and it does that in a power efficient way
too. Second, the balanced configurations seem to do better with NAMD. The configuration “C” and “D” are best
for NAMD, the particular choice depends on required GPU density/U.