Performance characteristics of a cosmology package on leading HPCarchitectures
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a snapshot of the Universe some 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The pattern of anisotropies in the CMB carries a wealth of information about the fundamental parameters of cosmology. Extracting this information is an extremely computationally expensive endeavor, requiring massively parallel computers and software packages capable of exploiting them. One such package is the Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package (MADCAP) which has been used to analyze data from a number of CMB experiments. In this work, we compare MADCAP performance on the vector-based Earth Simulator (ES) and Cray X1 architectures and two leading superscalar systems, the IBM Power3 and Power4. Our results highlight the complex interplay between the problem size, architectural paradigm, interconnect, and vendor-supplied numerical libraries, while isolating the I/O file system as the key bottleneck across all the platforms.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Director. Office of Science. Advanced ScientificComputing Research
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 924834
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-55280; R&D Project: K11121; BnR: KJ0101030; TRN: US200811%%83
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: High Performance Computing - HiPC 2004,Bangalore, India, Dec 19-22, 2004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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