Paper Info
Title
A Performance Evaluation Of The Nehalem Quad-Core Processor For Scientific Computing
Abstract
In this work we present an initial performance evaluation of Intel's latest, second-generation quad-core processor, Nehalem, and provide a comparison to first-generation AMD and Intel quad-core processors Barcelona and Tigerton. Nehalem is the first Intel processor to implement a NUMA architecture incorporating QuickPath Interconnect for interconnecting processors within a node, and the first to incorporate an integrated memory controller. We evaluate the suitability of these processors in quad-socket compute nodes as building blocks for large-scale scientific computing clusters. Our analysis of intra-processor and intra-node scalability of microbenchmarks, and a range of large-scale scientific applications, indicates that quad-core processors can deliver an improvement in performance of up to 4x over a single core depending on the workload being processed. However, scalability can be less when considering a full node. We show that Nehalem outperforms Barcelona on memory-intensive codes by a factor of two for a Nehalem node with 8 cores and a Barcelona node containing 16 cores. Further optimizations are possible with Nehalem, including the use of Simultaneous Multithreading, which improves the performance of some applications by up to 50%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1142/S012962640800351X
PARALLEL PROCESSING LETTERS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Performance Analysis, Multi-core, Scientific Applications
Single-core,Computer science,Parallel computing,Simultaneous multithreading,Computational science,Interconnection,Multi-core processor,Memory controller,Operating system,Distributed computing,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
4
0129-6264
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
25
2.94
3
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kevin J. Barker145538.70
Kei Davis241926.36
Adolfy Hoisie31465123.85
Darren J. Kerbyson41102104.36
Mike Lang518116.78
Scott Pakin61098134.55
José Carlos Sancho738229.97