SMP scaling on the Power Architecture. A Comparison of application Performance for Scientific computing.
Document Author:
Andrew Komornicki
Document ID:
WP101503
Doc. Organization:
Advanced Technical Support
Document Revised:
06/23/2009
Product(s) covered:
p5 560Q; p5 570; Power5; Power 6; POWER6 570
Abstract: We provide a comparison of processor and SMP performance for three representative Power series machines, Power6~(p570), Power5~(p570) and the Power6 (JS22 Blade) systems. While our results demonstrate that the Power6 machine is capable of providing superior single processor performance, and exemplary scalability as an SMP, such conclusions are oversimplified.
We find the scalability of both the Power6 and the Power5 machines to be exemplary as a modern SMP. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement of Power6 over Power5 in throughput scalability. The JS22 blades however fall into a lower category of SMP when compared with the p570 architecture. In all cases scalability is maximal for the \emph{poorest} single processor performance cases. As a corollary, computer code that generates the best single processor performance scales the least on each of these machines. This is especially true once SMT is turned on where the best written code can be hindered significantly. We document our results with an extensive set of tables and figures, an example of which is given below.
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Classification:
Hardware
Category:
Performance
Platform(s):
IBM Power Systems
:
Keywords:
smp scaling on Power6 and Power5
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