Publications

HPC application performance and scaling: Understanding trends and future challenges with application benchmarks on past, present and future tri-lab computing systems

Rajan, Mahesh; Doerfler, Douglas W.

In this paper HPC architectural characteristics and their impact on application performance and scaling are investigated. Performance data gathered over several generations of very large HPC systems like: ASC Red Storm, ASC Purple, and a large InfiniBand cluster - Red Sky, are analyzed. As the number of cache coherent cores and number of NUMA domains at a compute node keeps increasing, we analyze their impact with a few simple benchmarks and several applications. We present bottlenecks and remedies examining production applications. We conclude with preliminary early-hardware performance data from the ASC Cielo, a petaFLOPS class future capability system. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.