Performance evaluation of the cray XI distributed shared memory architecture

Thomas H. Dunigan, Jeffrey S. Vetter, Patrick H. Worley

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

Abstract

The Cray XI supercomputer is a distributed shared memory vector multiprocessor, scalable to 4096 processors and up to 65 terabytes of memory. The XI's hierarchical design uses the basic building block of the multi-streaming processor (MSP), which is capable of 12.8 GF/s for 64-bit operations. The distributed shared memory (DSM) of the XI presents a 64-bit global address space that is directly addressable from every MSP with an interconnect bandwidth per computation rate of one byte per floating point operation. Our results show that this high bandwidth and low latency for remote memory accesses translates into improved application performance on important applications, such as an Eulerian gyrokinetic-Maxwell solver. Furthermore, this architecture naturally supports programming models like the Cray shmem API, Unified Parallel C (UPC), and Co-Array FORTRAN (CAF), and it is imperative to select the appropriate models to exploit these features as our benchmarks demonstrate.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects, Hot Interconnects
EditorsS. Watters
Pages20-25
Number of pages6
StatePublished - 2004
EventProceedings - 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects, Hot Interconnects - Stanford, CA, United States
Duration: Aug 25 2004Aug 27 2004

Publication series

NameProceedings - 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects, Hot Interconnects

Conference

ConferenceProceedings - 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects, Hot Interconnects
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityStanford, CA
Period08/25/0408/27/04

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