Performance Analysis of the SiCortex SC072

The world of High Performance Computing (HPC) has seen a major shift towards commodity clusters in the last 10 years. A new company, SiCortex, has set out to break this trend. They have created what they claim to be a balanced cluster which makes use of low-power MIPS pro-cessors and a custom interconnect in an effort to avoid many of the bottle-necks plaguing most modern clusters. In this paper, we reveal the results of preliminary benchmarking of one of their systems, the SC072. First, we ran a collection of microbenchmarks to characterize the performance of interprocessor communication. Next, we ran some real applications relevant to high performance computing and compared performance and scalability to a typical commodity cluster. Lastly, we examine and com-pare the performance per watt of the SiCortex system to a commodity cluster.