A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 3
May 2007
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Red Storm Upgrade Evaluation Receives ISC Best Paper Award
Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories were awarded one of two Best Paper awards at the 2007 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). The paper, entitled “An Evaluation of the Impacts of Network Bandwidth and Dual-Core Processors on Scalability,” analyzes the impact of the processor and network upgrade of the Red Storm system at Sandia on ASC applications. Authors are Ron Brightwell, Keith Underwood, and Courtenay Vaughan.
The paper describes the hardware and software upgrade of the Red Storm system and analyzes application scaling and performance, comparing single-core and dual-core processors. Results showed that adding a second core provides from 20% to 50% performance boost on a fixed problem size per socket basis. Results also indicate that application scalability is impacted relatively little by the upgrade. Most degradation in parallel efficiency is directly attributable to contention for resources caused by having two cores in one socket; however, with the doubling in message passing interface tasks that is typical of using dual-core processors, it is possible to see scaling effects detrimental to overall performance when running at the largest scale.
ISC is the leading Supercomputing Conference and Exhibition in Europe. Each of the two Best Paper awardees for ISC are given a EUR 5000 prize sponsored by Microsoft. The award will be presented June 26, 2007, in Dresden, Germany.
See more info at http://www.supercomp.de/isc2007
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