Monday November 12, 2007

Dieter an Mey, HPC Team Lead at RWTH Aachen's Center for Computing and Communication, presented an evaluation of the suitability of Sun's UltraSPARC T2 processor for High Performance Computing at the HPC Consortium meeting in Reno.

The Aachen study compares systems with the T2 processor against systems with Sun's UltraSPARC IV processor, with AMD Opteron processors, and with Intel Woodcrest and Clovertown processors. The test cases used were representative of a range of applications and attributes that are important to users at Aachen.

I will briefly summarize the results here and recommend those interested in more detail visit this page for a full explanation of the methodology and to view the detailed results.

Aachen examined several performance kernels: memory bandwidth, LINPACK, and sparse matrix-vector multiplication. They also examined results for several applications, including TFS, which used to model nasal flow for computer-aided surgery. This code can be run in several ways using OpenMP for parallelization. They also ran FLOWer and a code does contact analysis of bevel gears. In addition to these application tests, Aachen ran multiple instances of applications simultaneously to assess the throughput capabilities of each system. A power and performance/power analysis was also done.

The results showed that a combination of T2-based systems and x64/x86 systems would be ideal for Aachen. Very cache-friendly codes did not benefit as much from the N2 architecture and these performed better on the Intel and AMD based systems. The bevel gear code is an example of such a code. TFS, on the other hand, performed better in throughput mode on the T2 system. In both cases the best results were 2X better than the altenative. That is, the Intel/AMD systems generally did about 2X better than the T2 system on cache-friendly codes while the T2 system was 2X better in cases where memory bandwidth was a limiting factor.