[BANANA] Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar, March 23, 2007

[Parry Husbands]

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