Hammond, Simon D., Mudalige, Gihan R., Smith, J. A., Davis, Jim, Jarvis, Stephen A., Holt, J., Miller, I., Herdman, J.A. and Vadgama, A. (2010) To upgrade or not to Upgrade? Catamount vs. Cray Linux environment. In: Large Scale Parallel Processing Workshop 2010 (LSPP10), Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Modern supercomputers are growing in diversity and complexity -- the arrival of technologies such as multi-core processors, general purpose-GPUs and specialised compute accelerators has increased the potential scientific delivery possible from such machines. This is not however without some cost, including significant increases in the sophistication and complexity of supporting operating systems and software libraries. This paper documents the development and application of methods to assess the {\em potential performance} of selecting one hardware, operating system (OS) and software stack combination against another. This is of particular interest to supercomputing centres, which routinely examine prospective software/architecture combinations and possible machine upgrades. A case study is presented that assesses the potential performance of a particle transport code on AWE's Cray XT3 8,000-core supercomputer running images of the Catamount and the Cray Linux Environment (CLE) operating systems. This work demonstrates that by running a number of small benchmarks on a test machine and network, and observing factors such as operating system noise, it is possible to speculate as to the performance impact of upgrading from one operating system to another on the system as a whole. This use of performance modelling represents an inexpensive method of examining the likely behaviour of a large supercomputer before and after an operating system upgrade; this method is also attractive if it is desirable to minimise system downtime while exploring software-system upgrades. The results show that benchmark tests run on less that 256 cores would suggest that the impact (overhead) of upgrading the operating system to CLE was less than 10%; model projections suggest that this is not the case at scale.

Item Type:	Conference Item (Paper)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Electronic computers. Computer science. Computer software
Divisions:	Faculty of Science > Computer Science
Date:	April 2010
Identification Number:	10.1109/IPDPSW.2010.5470885
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Conference Paper Type:	Paper
Title of Event:	Large Scale Parallel Processing Workshop 2010 (LSPP10)
Type of Event:	Workshop
Location of Event:	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Related URLs:	Other Repository
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/47434

Request changes to a record

Actions (login required)

View Item