Benchmarking the MIT LL HPCMP DHPI System

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Dedicated High Performance Computing Project Investment (DHPI) system was designed to address interactive algorithm development for Department of Defense (DoD) sensor processing systems. The results of the system acceptance test provide a clear quantitative picture of the capabilities of the system. The system acceptance test for MIT LL HPCMP DHPI hardware involved an array of benchmarks that exercised each of the components of the memory hierarchy, the scheduler, and the disk arrays. These benchmarks isolated the components to verify the functionality and performance of the system, and several system issues were discovered and rectified by using these benchmarks. The memory hierarchy was evaluated using the HPC Challenge benchmark suite, which is comprised of the following benchmarks: High Performance Linpack (HPL, also known as Top 500), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), STREAM, RandomAccess, and Effective Bandwidth. The compute nodes' Random Array of Independent Disks (RAID) arrays were evaluated with the Iozone benchmark. Finally, the scheduler and the reliability of the entire system were tested using both the HPC Challenge suite and the Iozone benchmark. For example executing the HPC Challenge benchmark suite on 416 processors, the system was able to achieve 1.42 TFlops (HPL), 34.7 GFlops (FFT), 1.24 TBytes/sec (STREAM Triad), and 0.16 GUPS (RandomAccess). This paper describes the components of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory HPCMP DHPI system, including its memory hierarchy. We present the HPC Challenge benchmark suite and Iozone benchmark and describe how each of the component benchmarks stress various 1 This work is sponsored by the Department of the Air Force under Air Force contract FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government. components of the TX-2500 system. The results of the benchmarks are discussed, and the implications they have on the performance of the system. We conclude with a presentation of the findings. Keywords: cluster computing, benchmarking, HPC Challenge, Iozone, memory hierarchy.