An analysis of system balance requirements for scientific applications

Sadaf R. Alam, Jeffrey S. Vetter

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Scientific applications are diverse in terms of the resource requirements, and tend to vary significantly from commercial applications. In order to provide sustained performance, a target high performance computing (HPC) platform must offer a balance between CPU performance to memory, interconnect and I/O subsystems performance. We characterize the system balance requirements for two largescale Office of Science applications, GYRO (fusion simulation) and POP (climate modeling), and develop platform-independent parameterized requirement models. We measure the parallel efficiencies for GYRO and POP on three multiprocessor systems: an SMP cluster (IBM p690), a shared-memory system (SGIAltix) and a vector supercomputer (Cray X1). The higher computational intensity and interconnect bandwidth requirements of GYRO result in higher performance efficiencies on the vector platform. At the same time, small message sizes in POP benefit from low MPI latencies of the shared-memory platform. Overall results confirm system balance requirements that are generated by the requirement models.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICPP 2006
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Parallel Processing
Pages229-236
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
EventICPP 2006: 2006 International Conference on Parallel Processing - Columbus, OH, United States
Duration: Aug 14 2006Aug 18 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing
ISSN (Print)0190-3918

Conference

ConferenceICPP 2006: 2006 International Conference on Parallel Processing
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityColumbus, OH
Period08/14/0608/18/06

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