Results from measuring the performance of the NAS benchmarks on the current generation of parallel computers and observations drawn from these measurements

The NAS Division at NASA Ames Research Center has developed a highly respected and widely used set of benchmarks for parallel computers. These benchmarks are based on the needs of computational fluid dynamics applications, but appear to have relevance to other disciplines as well. Unfortunately, NAS last published a collection of results for a wide range of systems in November of 1997. Given the rapid level of change in the field of computers in general, and high performance parallel computing, it seemed appropriate to try and fill in some of the gaps. As such, the major computational assets of the ARL-MSRC are being benchmarked, with the intent to publish the results on an ARL Web site. While making these measurements, several observations and conclusions were drawn. These observations and conclusions are discussed at length in this document.