Abstract
Supercomputer design is a complex, multi-dimensional optimization process, wherein several subsystems need to be reconciled to meet a desired figure of merit performance for a portfolio of applications and a budget constraint. However, overall, the HPC community has been gravitating towards ever more Flops, at the expense of many other subsystems. To draw attention to overall system balance, in this paper, we analyze balance ratios and architectural trends in the world's most powerful supercomputers. Specifically, we have collected the performance characteristics of systems between 1993 and 2019 based on the Top500 lists and then analyzed their architectures from diverse system design perspectives. Notably, our analysis studies the performance balance of the machines, across avariety of subsystems such as compute, memory, I/O, interconnect, intra-node connectivity and power. Our analysis reveals that balance ratios of the various subsystems need to be considered carefully alongside the application workload portfolio to provision the subsystem capacity and bandwidth specifications, which can help achieve optimal performance.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region, HPC Asia 2021 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Pages | 11-22 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450388429 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 20 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | 2021 International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region, HPC Asia 2021 - Virtual, Online, Korea, Republic of Duration: Jan 20 2021 → Jan 22 2021 |
Publication series
| Name | ACM International Conference Proceeding Series |
|---|
Conference
| Conference | 2021 International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region, HPC Asia 2021 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Korea, Republic of |
| City | Virtual, Online |
| Period | 01/20/21 → 01/22/21 |
Funding
This work was supported by, and used the resources of, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, located in the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL, which is managed by UT Battelle, LLC for the U.S. DOE (under the contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725). This research was supported in part by an appointment to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ASTRO Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. This work was also partly supported by Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2020-0-00104, Development of low-latency storage module for I/O intensive edge data processing) and Next-Generation Information Computing Development Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2017M3C4A7080243).
Keywords
- Architectural Trends and Performance Balance Ratio
- High Performance Computing
- Top500 Supercomputers