The Performance Effect of Multi-core on Scientific Applications

The historical trend of increasing single CPU performance has given way to roadmap of increasing core count. The challenge of effectively utilizing these multi-core chips is just starting to be explored by vendors and application developers alike. In this study, we present some performance measurements of several complete scientific applications on single and dual core Cray XT3 and XT4 systems with a view to characterizing the effects of switching to multi-core chips. We consider effects within a node by using applications run at low concurrencies, and also effects on node-interconnect interaction using higher concurrency results. Finally, we construct a simple performance model based on the principle on-chip shared resource--memory bandwidth--and use this to predict the performance of the forthcoming quad-core system