Low-level Benchmarking of a New Cluster Architecture
N. Eicker, Thomas Lippert · JuSER (Forschungszentrum Jülich) · 2007
JULI is a first of its kind project at Forschungszentrum Jülich accomplished during 2006.It was carried out to develop and evaluate a new cluster architecture.Together with the companies IBM, QLogic and ParTec a state-of-the-art cluster system was designed based on PPC 970MP CPUs and a this time novel PCIe version of the InfiniPath interconnect.Together with the ParaStation cluster management system these components guaranteed an effortless handling of the system resulting in start of full production by end of 2006.We present results of synthetic, machine-oriented benchmarks shedding light on the capabilities of JULI's architecture.Problems revealed include the latency of the inter-node communication which suffers from many stages between CPU and host channel adapter (HCA).Furthermore, general issues like the memory-bandwidth bottlenecks of the dual-core processors-which will become more severe on upcoming multi-core CPUs-are discussed.