Evaluation of leading scalar and vector architectures for scientific computations

Technical Report · Tue Apr 20 04:00:00 EDT 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/833953· OSTI ID:833953

Simon, Horst D ^[1]; Oliker, Leonid; Canning, Andrew; Carter, Jonathan; Ethier, Stephane; Shalf, John

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1. LBNL Library

The growing gap between sustained and peak performance for scientific applications is a well-known problem in high performance computing. The recent development of parallel vector systems offers the potential to reduce this gap for many computational science codes and deliver a substantial increase in computing capabilities. This project examines the performance of the cacheless vector Earth Simulator (ES) and compares it to superscalar cache-based IBM Power3 system. Results demonstrate that the ES is significantly faster than the Power3 architecture, highlighting the tremendous potential advantage of the ES for numerical simulation. However, vectorization of a particle-in-cell application (GTC) greatly increased the memory footprint preventing loop-level parallelism and limiting scalability potential.

• Research Organization: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Director. Office of Science. Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. Mathematical Information and Computational Sciences Division. Contracts DE-AC03-76SF00098 and DE-AC020-76-CH03073 (US)
• DOE Contract Number: AC03-76SF00098
• OSTI ID: 833953
• Report Number(s): LBNL--55291
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
ARCHITECTURE
EVALUATION
PERFORMANCE
SCALARS
SIMULATION
SIMULATORS
VECTORS