An empirical performance evaluation of scalable scientific applications

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

48 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate the scalability, architectural requirements, and performance characteristics of eight scalable scientific applications. Our analysis is driven by empirical measurements using statistical and tracing instrumentation for both communication and computation. Based on these measurements, we refine our analysis into precise explanations of the factors that influence performance and scalability for each application; we distill these factors into common traits and overall recommendations for both users and designers of scalable platforms. Our experiments demonstrate that some traits, such as improvements in the scaling and performance of MPI's collective operations, will benefit most applications. We also find specific characteristics of some applications that limit performance. For example, one application's intensive use of a 64-bit, floating-point divide instruction, which has high latency and is not pipelined on the POWER3, limits the performance of the application's primary computation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the IEEE/ACM SC 2002 Conference, SC 2002
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)076951524X
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002
Externally publishedYes
Event2002 IEEE/ACM Conference on Supercomputing, SC 2002 - Baltimore, United States
Duration: Nov 16 2002Nov 22 2002

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing
Volume2002-November

Conference

Conference2002 IEEE/ACM Conference on Supercomputing, SC 2002
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore
Period11/16/0211/22/02

Funding

We wish to thank the ASCI Purple Benchmark Team and the application developers for making these benchmarks available, and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W-7405-Eng-48. This paper is available as LLNL Technical Report UCRL-JC-148061.

FundersFunder number
U.S. Department of Energy
University of California
Lawrence Livermore National LaboratoryW-7405-Eng-48

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