Application Scalability and Performance on Multicore Architectures

The US Army Engineer Research and Development Center Major Shared Resource Center has recently upgraded its Cray XT3 system from single-core to dual- core AMD Opteron processors and has procured a quad- core XT4 supercomputer for installation in early 2008. This paper provides performance analysis of several representative Department of Defense applications executed on single-core and dual-core AMD Opteron processors. The authors provide a detailed strong- scaling study that focuses on addressing some areas of contention that may lead to increased job run times on applications running on many thousands of processors. The authors intend to use the results of this study as a guide for determining application performance on the quad-core Cray XT4.