Title
An Application-Based Performance Characterization of the Columbia Supercluster
Abstract
Columbia is a 10,240-processor supercluster consisting of 20 Altix nodes with 512 processors each, and currently ranked as one of the fastest computers in the world. In this paper, we present the performance characteristics of Columbia obtained on up to four computing nodes interconnected via the InfiniBand and/or NUMAlink4 communication fabrics. We evaluate floatingpoint performance, memory bandwidth, message passing communication speeds, and compilers using a subset of the HPC Challenge benchmarks, and some of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks including the multi-zone versions. We present detailed performance results for three scientific applications of interest to NASA, one from molecular dynamics, and two from computational fluid dynamics. Our results show that both the NUMAlink4 and In- finiBand interconnects hold promise for multi-node application scaling to at least 2048 processors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1109/SC.2005.11
SC
Keywords
Field
DocType
fluid dynamics,floating point,bandwidth,floating point arithmetic,molecular dynamic,molecular dynamics,memory bandwidth,computational fluid dynamics,message passing,compilers,messages
Memory bandwidth,Ranking,InfiniBand,Computer science,Floating point,Parallel computing,Compiler,Supercluster,Bandwidth (signal processing),Message passing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-59593-061-2
14
1.97
References 
Authors
6
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rupak Biswas1922109.66
M. Jahed Djomehri23712.64
Robert Hood38710.42
Haoqiang Jin428431.77
Cetin C. Kiris5142.31
subhash saini656147.57