Architecture Characterization of DoD MSRC HPC Platforms

This paper outlines the results for a set of low-level, architecture characterization benchmarks that measure the performance of dense numerical computations, access to the memory hierarchy and MPI message passing of three high performance architectures. The machines evaluated are the Cray T3E, IBM SP, and SGI Origin 2000 platforms at the CEWES Major Shared Resource Center. Verification of the results was done at the ARL and ASC MSRCs. The data presented here should be of interest to developers as a point of reference for application performance, modeling and scalability analysis. Introduction This paper describes three low-level, single processor benchmarks developed to measure some critical factors affecting application performance among the newest parallel machines at various DoD MSRCs. A brief summary of the results is also included here. For further details, the reader is referred to the full version of this paper that can be found at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mucci/dodmsrc.html. 1. ..