HPCwire: The Cray XT3 - A Unique Resource at PSC

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June 09, 2006

The Cray XT3 - A Unique Resource at PSC

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The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is well-known for its cutting-edge research and its ability to transform new technologies into useful scientific tools. Within the past year, PSC's new Cray XT3 supercomputer has been used for some exciting new work and has proved to be one of the most powerful computational resources on the TeraGrid.

HPCwire recently got the opportunity to talk with the two PSC scientific co-directors, Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, and ask them about new developments at PSC and about what's in store for the center's future. In part one of this two-part interview, Roskies and Levine discuss the significance of PSC's Cray XT3 supercomputer.

HPCwire: PSC's 10-teraflop Cray XT3, which became a production resource on the TeraGrid last October, was the first Cray XT3 anywhere and is the only one available to NSF researchers. What led you to decide on this system and what advantages does it have as a resource for computational science?

Roskies: We have discovered in the past that if we can bring a substantially new technical capability into production we can open up new fields of science. In particular, we seek systems that when used as a whole make it possible to tackle problems that were previously infeasible.

One particular technical strength of the XT3 that attracted us is its interconnect. Like LeMieux, our HP terascale system that preceded it, the XT3 is a tightly coupled system with a very strong interconnect. The XT3 interconnect is a significant advance in interconnect technology since LeMieux, and it's substantially better than competing systems.

The superior interconnect is a large advantage for projects that demand hundreds or thousands of processors working together. Because of the advanced interconnect, the processors share information much more quickly than they otherwise would, and this makes a very meaningful difference for many of the most demanding kinds of science that can be attacked with supercomputing.

The other feature that attracted us to the XT3 was the excellent balance between processor speed and memory bandwidth that the Opterons display. To realize a larger fraction of peak performance on real scientific applications, one has to be sure that one can supply the processors with enough operands to keep busy.

HPCwire: On a processor-clock basis, the XT3 is 2.4 times faster than LeMieux, your six-teraflop system, yet reports are that the XT3 boosts performance more than ten-fold on some applications. How is this accomplished?

Levine: We've run dozens of codes on the XT3 over the past year, and sometimes we're seeing performance increases of an order of a magnitude and more. There are several factors involved in this. First is the interconnect. As Ralph pointed out, the XT3 interconnect is a substantial improvement over LeMieux. That factor alone represents about an order of magnitude for large-scale parallel applications. This is over and above the speedup from faster processors.

The XT3 also has better memory bandwidth than LeMieux. The interconnect provides the means for each processor to communicate with other processors. Memory bandwidth is the ability of each processor to communicate with its own local memory. Even correcting for the faster processor speed, the memory bandwidth of the XT3 is 33 percent better than LeMieux.

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