SC Conference - Activity Details

Gregory Newby  (Arctic Region Supercomputing Center)

Don Bahls  (Arctic Region Supercomputing Center)

John Mitchell  (Arctic Region Supercomputing Center)

Tuesday,  05:15PM - 07:00PM

Room Rotunda Lobby

During summer 2008, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) deployed a cluster based on QS22 compute blades. Each blade provides two Cell BE processors, each with 8 synergistic processing elements (SPEs). The PowerXCell 8i processors are improved from those found in Playstations and elsewhere. ARSC's cluster is called Quasar. This poster presents benchmarks and application performance measures from Quasar. Low-level tests summarize basic capabilities of processors and nodes, while system-level tests examine the interconnect, storage subsystem, memory latency, and similar features. MPI tests look at the ability of Quasar to perform multiprocessing work. The suitability of Quasar for real-world parallel applications is assessed. With twelve QS22 blades, each with two PowerXcell 8i processors rated at 200Glops (single precision, 100GFlops SP), theoretical single precision performance for Quasar is close to 5TFlops. The poster provides insight into performance achieved on benchmarks and real-world applications.