Comparing cross-platform performance via node-to-node scaling studies
Kenneth G. Weiss, Thomas Stitt, W. Daryl Hawkins, Olga Pearce, Stephanie Brink, Robert N. Rieben · The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications · 2025
Due to the increasing diversity of high-performance computing architectures, researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in comparing a code’s performance and scalability across different platforms. However, there is a lack of available guidance on how to actually set up and analyze such cross-platform studies. In this paper, we contend that the natural base unit of computing for such studies is a single compute node on each platform and offer guidance in setting up, running, and analyzing node-to-node scaling studies. We propose templates for presenting scaling results of these studies and provide several case studies highlighting the benefits of this approach.