Performance Evaluation of Supercomputers using HPCC and IMB Benchmarks

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite and the Intel MPI Benchmark (IMB) are used to compare and evaluate the combined performance of processor, memory subsystem and interconnect fabric of five leading supercomputers - SGI Altix BX2, Cray XI, Cray Opteron Cluster, Dell Xeon cluster, and NEC SX-8. These five systems use five different networks (SGI NUMALINK4, Cray network, Myrinet, InfiniBand, and NEC IXS). The complete set of HPCC benchmarks are run on each of these systems. Additionally, we present Intel MPI Benchmarks (IMB) results to study the performance of 11 MPI communication functions on these systems

Benchmark Design for Characterization of Balanced High-Performance Architectures

We describe the design and MPI implementation of two benchmarks created to characterize the balanced system performance of high-performance clusters and supercomputers. We start with a communication-specific benchmark, called b eff that characterizes the message passing performance of a system. Following the same line of development, we extend this work to the design and implementation of the effective I/O bandwidth benchmark (b eff io). Both of these benchmarks have two goals: a) to obtain a single bandwidth number that characterizes the average performance of the system namely processor communication for b eff, and the I/O subsystem for b eff io, and b) to get a detailed insight into the performance strengths and weaknesses of different parallel communication and I/O patterns. Both benchmarks use a time-driven approach and loop over a variety of communication and access patterns to characterize a system in a fairly automated fashion. Results of the two benchmarks are given for several systems including IBM SPs, Cray T3E, NEC SX-5, and Hitachi SR 8000. 1

Development Strategies for Modern Predictive Simulation Codes

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The parallel effective i/o bandwidth benchmark: b eff io. Message Passing Interface Developer’s and User’s Conference (MPIDC

ABSTRACT. The parallel effective I/O bandwidth benchmark (b_eff_io) is aimed at producing a characteristic average number of the I/O bandwidth achievable with parallel MPI-I/O applications exhibiting various access patterns and using various buffer lengths. It is designed so that 15 minutes should be sufficient for a first pass of all access patterns. First results of the b_eff_io benchmark are given for the IBM SP, Cray T3E, Hitachi SR 8000, and NEC SX-5 systems, and a discussion follows about problematic issues of our current approach. We show how a redesign of our time-driven approach allows for rapid benchmarking of I/O bandwidth with various compute partition sizes. Next, we present how implementation specific file hints can be enabled selectively on a per access pattern basis, and we illustrate the benefit that hints can provide using the latest version of the IBM MPI-IO/GPFS prototype

Performance Comparison of Cray X1 and Cray Opteron Cluster with Other Leading Platforms using HPCC and IMB Benchmarks *

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite and the Intel MPI Benchmark (IMB) are used to compare and evaluate the combined performance of processor, memory subsystem and interconnect fabric of six leadin