Characterizing the performance benefit of hybrid memory system for HPC applications.

•We perform memory-centric analysis of tested applications.•We quantify the performance impact of using different memory configurations (HBM-only, cache and DRAM-only), problem size, and number of threads on representative HPC applications.•We identify three factors that impact performance benefits from the HBM-DRAM memory system of the KNL processors.•We show that applications with regular memory access patterns largely benefit the HBM. On the contrary, applications with irregular access patterns may have performance degradation from the high latency in HBM.