Cray XT4: An early evaluation for petascale scientific simulation

Sadaf R. Alam, Richard F. Barrett, Mark R. Fahey, Jeffery A. Kuehn, Jeff M. Larkin, Ramanan Sankaran, Patrick H. Worley

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

48 Scopus citations

Abstract

The scientific simulation capabilities of next generation high-end computing technology will depend on striking a balance among memory, processor, I/O, and local and global network performance across the breadth of the scientific simulation space. The Cray XT4 combines commodity AMD dual core Opteron processor technology with the second generation of Cray's custom communication accelerator in a system design whose balance is claimed to be driven by the demands of scientific simulation. This paper presents an evaluation of the Cray XT4 using micro-benchmarks to develop a controlled understanding of individual system components, providing the context for analyzing and comprehending the performance of several petascale-ready applications. Results gathered from several strategic application domains are compared with observations on the previous generation Cray XT3 and other high-end computing systems, demonstrating performance improvements across a wide variety of application benchmark problems. (c) 2007 ACM.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, SC'07
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, SC'07 - Reno, NV, United States
Duration: Nov 10 2007Nov 16 2007

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, SC'07

Conference

Conference2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, SC'07
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityReno, NV
Period11/10/0711/16/07

Keywords

  • AORSA
  • CAM
  • Cray XT4
  • HPCC
  • IOR
  • NAMD
  • POP
  • S3D

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