Herdman, J. A., Gaudin, W. P., Turland, D. and Hammond, Simon D.. (2011) Benchmarking and modelling of POWER-7, Westmere, BG/P, and GPUs : an industry case study. ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, 38 (4). pp. 16-22. ISSN 0163-5999

Abstract

This paper introduces an industry strength, multi-purpose, benchmark: Shamrock. Developed at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), Shamrock is a two dimensional (2D) structured hydrocode; one of its aims is to assess the impacts of a change in hardware, and (in conjunction with a larger HPC Benchmark Suite) to provide guidance in procurement of future systems. A suitable test problem is described and executed on a local, high-end, workstation for a range of compilers and MPI implementations. Based on these observations, specific configurations are subsequently built and executed on a se- lection of HPC architectures, including Intel’s Nehalem and Westmere micro architectures, IBM’s POWER-5, POWER- 6, POWER-7, BlueGene/L, BlueGene/P, and AMD’s Opter- on chip set. Comparisons are made between these architec- tures, for the Shamrock benchmark, and relative compute resources are specified that deliver similar time to solution, along with their associated power budgets. Additionally, performance comparisons are made for a port of the benchmark to a Nehalem based cluster, accel- erated with Tesla C1060 GPUs, with details of the port, and extrapolations to possible performance of the GPU.

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