A Detailed Performance Characterization of Columbia using Aeronautics Benchmarks and Applications
Michael J. Aftosmis, Marsha Berger, Rajdwip Biswas, M. Jahed Djomehri, Robert T. Hood, Haoqiang H. Jin, Cetin C. Kiris · 44th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit · 2006
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 investigate its suitability as a capability computing platform for aeronautics applications. We present the performance charac-teristics of Columbia obtained on up to eight computing nodes interconnected via the InfiniBand and/or NUMAlink4 communication fabrics. To perform the assessment, we used a subset of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, including the multi-zone versions, and three computational fluid dynamics applications of interest to NASA. Our results show that the system holds promise for multinode application scaling to at least 4096 processors.