SCHEDULE: NOV 10-16, 2007

Cray XT4: An Early Evaluation for Petascale Scientific Simulation

Session: Benchmarking

Event Type: Paper

Time: 11:00am - 11:30am

Session Chair: Allan Snavely

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

Location: A1 / A6

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.

This paper can be found in the ACM Digital Libaries
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Chair/Author Details:

Allan Snavely (Chair)
SDSC

Sadaf R. Alam
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Richard F. Barrett
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Mark R. Fahey
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Jeffery A. Kuehn
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Jeff M. Larkin
Cray, Inc.

Ramanan Sankaran
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Patrick H. Worley
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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