Pentium Pro inside: I. a treecode at 430 Gigaflops on ASCI Red; II. price/performance of $50/Mflop on Loki and Hyglac
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (United States)
- California Inst. of Tech., Pasadena, CA (United States). Center for Advanced Computing Research
- Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain (Belgium). Mechanical Engineering Dept.
As an entry for the 1997 Gordon Bell performance prize, we present results from two methods of solving the gravitational N-body problem on the Intel Teraflops system at Sandia National Laboratory (ASCI Red). The first method, an O(N{sup 2}) algorithm, obtained 635 Gigaflops for a 1 million particle problem on 6800 Pentium Pro processors. The second solution method, a tree-code which scales as O(N log N), sustained 170 Gigaflops over a continuous 9.4 hour period on 4096 processors, integrating the motion of 322 million mutually interacting particles in a cosmology simulation, while saving over 100 Gigabytes of raw data. Additionally, the tree-code sustained 430 Gigaflops on 6800 processors for the first 5 time-steps of that simulation. This tree-code solution is approximately 105 times more efficient than the O(N{sup 2}) algorithm for this problem. As an entry for the 1997 Gordon Bell price/performance prize, we present two calculations from the disciplines of astrophysics and fluid dynamics. The simulations were performed on two 16 Pentium Pro processor Beowulf-class computers (Loki and Hyglac) constructed entirely from commodity personal computer technology, at a cost of roughly $50k each in September, 1996. The price of an equivalent system in August 1997 is less than $30. At Los Alamos, Loki performed a gravitational tree-code N-body simulation of galaxy formation using 9.75 million particles, which sustained an average of 879 Mflops over a ten day period, and produced roughly 10 Gbytes of raw data.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 629329
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-97-3456; CONF-9706166-; ON: DE98000260; TRN: AD-a337 792
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Supercomputing `97, Las Vegas, NV (United States), 30 Jun - 3 Jul 1997; Other Information: PBD: Jun 1997
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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