Early evaluation of the Cray XT3

Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently received delivery of a 5,294 processor Cray XT3. The XT3 is Cray’s third-generation massively parallel processing system. The system builds on a single processor node— built around the AMD Opteron—and uses a custom chip— called SeaStar—to provide interprocessor communication. In addition, the system uses a lightweight operating system on the compute nodes. This paper describes our initial experiences with the system, including micro-benchmark, kernel, and application benchmark results. In particular, we provide performance results for strategic Department of Energy applications areas including climate and fusion. We demonstrate experiments on the installed system, scaling applications up to 4,096 processors.