Cray XT4: An Early Evaluation for Petascale Scientific Simulation

Conference · Sun Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1362622.1362675· OSTI ID:958817

Alam, Sadaf R ^[1]; Barrett, Richard F ^[1]; Fahey, Mark R ^[1]; Kuehn, Jeffery A ^[1]; Sankaran, Ramanan ^[1]; Worley, Patrick H ^[1]; Larkin, Jeffrey M ^[1]

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1. ORNL

The scientific simulation capabilities of next generation high-end computing technology will depend on striking a balance among memory, processor, I/O, and local and global network performance across the breadth of the scientific simulation space. The Cray XT4 combines commodity AMD dual core Opteron processor technology with the second generation of Cray's custom communication accelerator in a system design whose balance is claimed to be driven by the demands of scientific simulation. This paper presents an evaluation of the Cray XT4 using microbenchmarks to develop a controlled understanding of individual system components, providing the context for analyzing and comprehending the performance of several petascale-ready applications. Results gathered from several strategic application domains are compared with observations on the previous generation Cray XT3 and other high-end computing systems, demonstrating performance improvements across a wide variety of application benchmark problems.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Center for Computational Sciences
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 958817
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English