HPL on CCS at UT

  • Article

posted Monday, February 19, 2007 7:08 PM by dongarra | 0 Comments

  • High Performance Linpack (HPL)

  The Top500 is a list computers ranked by their performance on the HPL Benchmark.
HPL is a software package that solves a (random) dense linear system in double
precision (64 bits) arithmetic on distributed-memory computers. It can thus be
regarded as a portable as well as freely available implementation of the
High Performance Linpack Benchmark.

Current Status

 Currently we have compiled HPL with both Visual Studio 2005 and Subsystem for
UNIX Applications (SUA). We have run HPL successfully on all of our interfaces
which include: GigE, Mellanox's Infiniband, Silverstorm's Infiniband, and Myricom's Myrinet.
We have also compiled HPL against both Intel's MKL and AMD's ACML BLAS libraries to
compare performance results since our cluster runs AMD Opteron processors.
The ACML BLAS performs much faster. The only thing we have been unsuccessful at
running is HPL with Winsock Direct (WSD).
Currently achieving 242.4 GFlops on 96 processors.

Future Work

 Upcoming work on HPL will focus primarily on understanding performance differences
between Windows CCS and Linux. Based on the findings we will tune the code.
We're interested in creating tuning guidelines for various interconnects and the
BLAS libraries in use. Also, we will attempt to get HPL running with WSD so that
we have a better comparison of results against Linux.

For more information about the Top500 and HPL,
visit the respective websites at
https://www.top500.org/
and
https://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/