Berkeley Lab Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:

Friday, March 23, 2007

Time:

1:00pm-2:00pm

Location:

Building 50B-4205

Seminar Speaker:

Lenny Oliker
Future Technologies Group
CRD, LBNL
http://crd.lbl.gov/~oliker

Title:

Scientific Application Performance on Candidate PetaScale Platforms

Abstract:

After a decade where HEC (high-end computing) capability was dominated by the rapid pace of improvements to CPU clock frequency, the performance of next-generation supercomputers is increasingly differentiated by varying interconnect designs and levels of integration. Understanding the tradeoffs of these system designs, in the context of high-end numerical simulations, is a key step towards making effective petascale computing a reality. This work represents one of the most comprehensive performance evaluation studies to date on modern HEC systems, including the IBM Power5, AMD Opteron, IBM BG/L, and Cray X1E. A novel aspect of our study is the emphasis on full applications, with real input data at the scale desired by computational scientists in their unique domain. We examine six candidate ultra-scale applications, representing a broad range of algorithms and computational structures. Overall results indicate that our evaluated codes have the potential to effectively utilize petascale resources; however, several applications will require reengineering to incorporate the additional levels of parallelism necessary to achieve the vast concurrency of upcoming ultra-scale systems.

This work was selected as the Best Paper in the Applications track of the upcoming IPDPS 2007 conference.

Sponsor of Seminar:

Parry Husbands

Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov