An Empirical Study of Hyper-Threading in High-Performance Computing Clusters
Tau Leng, Rizwan Ali, Jenwei Hsieh, V. Mashayekhi, R. Rooholamini · 2002
The effects of Intel Hyper-Threading technology on a system performance vary according to the type of applications the system is running. Hyper-Threading affects High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters similarly. The characteristics of application run on a cluster will determine whether Hyper-Threading will help or hinder performance. In addition, the operating system’s support for scheduling tasks, with Hyper-Threading enabled, is an important factor in the overall performance of the system. In this paper, we used an experimental approach to demonstrate the performance gain or degradation of various parallel benchmarks running on a Linux cluster. The results of these benchmarks show that performance varies as a function of the number of nodes and the number of processors per node. Furthermore, we used a performance analysis tool to determine the cause of these performance differences when Hyper-Threading was enabled versus disabled. Our analysis shows the correlation between the cluster performance and the program characteristics, such as computational type, cache and memory usage, and message-passing properties. We conclude the paper by providing guidance on how to best apply Hyper-Threading technology to application classes.