Balance of HPC Systems Based on HPCC Benchmark Results
Rolf Rabenseifner · 2005
Abstract. Based on results reported by the HPC Challenge benchmark suite (HPCC), the balance between computational speed, communication bandwidth, and memory bandwidth is analyzed for HPC systems from Cray, NEC, IBM, and other vendors, and clusters with various network interconnects. Strength and weakness of the communication interconnect is examined for three communication patterns. The HPCC suite was released to analyze the performance of high-performance computing architectures using several kernels to measure different memory and hardware access patterns comprising latency based measurements, memory streaming, inter-process communication and floating point computation. HPCC defines a set of benchmarks augmenting the High Performance Linpack used in the Top500 list. This paper describes the inter-process communication benchmarks of this suite. Based on the effective bandwidth benchmark, a special parallel random and natural ring communication benchmark has been developed for HPCC. Ping-Pong benchmarks on a set of process pairs can be used for further characterization of a system. This paper analyzes first results achieved with HPCC. The focus of this paper is on the balance between computational speed, memory bandwidth, and inter-node communication. Keywords. HPCC, network bandwidth, effective bandwidth, Linpack,