Analysis and Optimization of the HPCC Randomaccess Benchmark on Blue Gene/L Supercomputer : Extended Version

The performance of supercomputers has traditionally been evaluated using the LINPACK benchmark, which stresses only the floating point units without significantly loading the memory or the network subsystems.

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite is being proposed as an alternative to evaluate the performance of supercomputers. The HPCC benchmark suite consists of seven benchmarks, each designed to measure a specific aspect of the system performance.

In this paper, we analyze the HPCC Randomaccess benchmark which is designed to measure the performance of random memory updates. We study the performance of this benchmark on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. We describe the optimizations made to get optimal performance and discuss the inherent limits in scaling this benchmark to massively parallel systems.

By: Rahul Garg, Yogish Sabharwal

Published in: RI05010 in 2006

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RI-05-010.pdf

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