Application-based early performance evaluation of SGI altix 4700 systems for SGI systems

Abstract

The suitability of the next generation of high performance computing systems for petascale simulations will depend on a balance between various factors such as processor performance, memory performance, local and global network performance, and Input/Output (I/O) performance. As the supercomputing industry develops new technologies for these subsystems, achieving system balance becomes challenging. In this paper we evaluate the performance of newly introduced dual-core based SGI Altix 4700 systems (both Bandwidth and Density models) and we compare their performance with that of a single-core based SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 system. The SGI Altix 4700 Density system installed in October 2007 at NASA Ames Research Center is the largest 2048-processor single system image (SSI) system in the world. We used the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark, NAS Parallel benchmarks (NPB) and five real-world applications, three from computational fluid dynamics, one from climate modeling and one from nanotechnology. Our study shows that the SGI Altix 4700 Bandwidth system performs slightly better and SGI Altix 4700 Density system performs slightly worse than the SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 up to 128 processors, while the performance of the systems is almost the same beyond 128 processors, when the communication time dominates the compute time.

Efficient hardware support for the Partitioned Global Address Space

“…Considering coherent distributed shared memory systems there are a couple of systems. Examples for commercial projects include the SGI Origin [8] and SGI Altix [9]. An example for a research project is the Stanford DASH/FLASH [10], but this project was finished a long time ago.…”

HPCC RandomAccess benchmark for next generation supercomputers

“…For example, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer [1] has 4 cores per node, RoadRunner [2] has a nine-core STI Cell chip per Opteron core, SGI Altix ICE [3], [4] has dual-core/quad-core Intel Xeon processors. This trend, primarily driven by increasing power consumption and the diminishing gains in processor performance from increasing operating frequency is also reflected in desktop and server processors [5], [6].…”