A performance evaluation of the Cray X1 for scientific applications
The last decade has witnessed a rapid proliferation of superscalar cache-based microprocessors to build high-end capability and capacity computers primarily because of their generality, scalability, and cost effectiveness. However, the recent development of massively parallel vector systems is having a significant effect on the supercomputing landscape. In this paper, we compare the performance of the recently-released Cray X1 vector system with that of the cacheless NEC SX-6 vector machine, and the superscalar cache-based IBM Power3 and Power4 architectures for scientific applications. Overall results demonstrate that the X1 is quite promising, but performance improvements are expected as the hardware, systems software, and numerical libraries mature. Code reengineering to effectively utilize the complex architecture may also lead to significant efficiency enhancements.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Director. Office of Science. Office of Advanced Science Computing Research; National Aeronautics and Space Administration Contract DTTS59-99-D-00437/A61812D, Advanced Management Technology Inc, Computer Sciences Corporation (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- OSTI ID:
- 832774
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-54905; R&D Project: K11115; TRN: US200429%%1570
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: VECPAR'04: 6th International Meeting on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, Valencia (ES), 06/28/2004--06/30/2004; Other Information: PBD: 2 May 2004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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