Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:

Friday, October 29, 2004

Time:

1:00pm-2:00pm

Location:

50A-5132

Seminar Speaker:

Erich Strohmaier
CRD, LBNL

Title:

APEX-Map: A Synthetic Benchmark to Explore the Space of Application Performance

Abstract:

In areas such as performance evaluation or computer architecture we often face the question, if the performance behavior of a real application code can be approximated by a simpler synthetic benchmark. In our Application Performance Characterization project (APEX) we investigate the question if the performance scaling behavior of applications and algorithms can be characterized by a few application specific and hardware independent performance factors. Our focus is on the performance aspects of global memory access, since memory performance has increasingly become the dominant performance factor for many applications. We developed a performance characterization for memory access and a corresponding benchmark ? the memory access probe (Apex-MAP). This benchmark explores the whole range of possible spatial and temporal localities of global data access with a minimal set of parameters. We present our framework for performance characterization, the implementation concepts of APEX-Map in MPI, and its performance results.

Sponsor of Seminar:

TBA

Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov