Supercomputer workload decomposition and analysis
David Bradley, George V. Cybenko, John L. Larson, Firoz Ahmad, Joseph T. Golab, M. Straka · 1991
The workload of the NSF supercomputer center at the University of Illinois is decomposed into its major constituent programs, and performance characteristics of those programs are described in detail.The resulting data is compared with similar data obtained from standard benchmarks showing that applications level programs are clearly distinct from kernel and algorithm benchmarks.The workload decomposition shows that overidl utilization is quite high but is heavily influenced by a small number of sophisticated users with large allocations who run highly efficient programs.Some high level profifing data leads to an analysis of the benefits of inliniug subroutines.A number of other preliminary results are also described.This effort, called the Supercomputer Applications Database (SAD) Project, is the first detailed workload analysis of a US national supercomputer center.