SC Conference - Activity Details
Scientific Application-based Performance Comparison of SGI Altix 4700, IBM POWER5+, and SGI Altix ICE 8200 Supercomputers
Authors:| Subhash Saini (NASA Ames Research Center) |
| Dale Talcott (NASA Ames Research Center) |
| Dennis Jespersen (NASA Ames Research Center) |
| Jahed Djomehri (NASA Ames Research Center) |
| Haoqiang Jin (NASA Ames Research Center) |
| Rupak Biswas (NASA Ames Research Center) |
| HPC Systems |
| Tuesday, 11:30AM - 12:00PM |
| Room Ballroom F |
The suitability of next-generation high-performance computing systems
for petascale simulations will depend on various performance factors
attributable to processor, memory, local and global network, and
input/output characteristics. In this paper, we evaluate performance
of new dual-core SGI Altix 4700, quad-core SGI Altix ICE 8200, and
dual-core IBM POWER5+ systems. To measure performance, we used
microbenchmarks from High Performance Computing Challenge, NAS
Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), and four real world applications, three
from computational fluid dynamics and one from climate
modeling. We used the microbenchmarks to develop a controlled
understanding of individual system components, then analyzed and
interpreted performance of the NPBs and applications. We also
explored the hybrid programming model (MPI+OpenMP) using multizone
NPBs and the CFD application OVERFLOW-2. Achievable application
performance is compared across the systems. For the ICE platform, we
also investigated the effect of memory bandwidth on performance by
testing 1, 2, 4 and 8 cores per node.
The full paper can be found in the
IEEE Xplore Digital Library
and
ACM Digital Library
| IEEE Computer Society / ACM | 2 0 Y E A R S - U N L E A S H I N G T H E P O W E R O F H P C |