Understanding Application Performance via Micro-Benchmarks on Three Large Supercomputers: Intrepid, Ranger and Jaguar
International Journal for High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA) 2010
Publication Type: Paper
Repository URL: 200804_PerfComp
Abstract
Emergence of new parallel architectures presents new challenges for
application developers. Supercomputers vary in processor speed,
network topology, interconnect communication characteristics and
memory subsystems. This paper presents a performance comparison of
three of the fastest machines in the world: IBM's Blue Gene/P
installation at ANL (Intrepid), the SUN-Infiniband cluster at TACC
(Ranger) and Cray's XT4 installation at ORNL (Jaguar). Comparisons
are based on three applications selected by NSF for the Track 1
proposal to benchmark the Blue Waters system: NAMD, MILC and a
turbulence code, DNS. We present a comprehensive overview of the
architectural details of each of these machines and a comparison of
their basic performance parameters. Application performance is
presented for multiple problem sizes and the relative performance
on the selected machines is explained through micro-benchmarking
results. We hope that insights from this work will be useful to
managers making buying decisions for supercomputers and application
users trying to decide on a machine to run on. Based on the
performance analysis techniques used in the paper, we also suggest
a step-by-step procedure for estimating the suitability of a given
architecture for a highly parallel application.
TextRef
Abhinav Bhatele, Lukasz Wesolowski, Eric Bohm, Edgar Solomonik and Laxmikant V. Kale, Understanding application performance via micro-benchmarks on three large supercomputers: Intrepid, Ranger and Jaguar, accepted for publication in International Journal for High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), 2010.
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