Evaluating Architectures for Application-Specific Parallel Scientific Computing Systems

Authors:
Murphy, Mark
Keutzer, Kurt
Oliker, Leonid
Rowen, Chris
Shalf, John
Technical Report Identifier: EECS-2008-13
February 12, 2008
EECS-2008-13.pdf

Abstract: In this work, we examine the computational efficiency of scientific applications on three high-performance-computing systems based on processors of varying degrees of specialization: an x86 server processor, the AMD Opteron; a more specialized System-on-Chip solution, the BlueGene/L and BlueGene/P; and a configurable embedded core, the Tensilica Xtensa. We use the atmospheric component of the global Community Atmospheric Model to motivate our study by defining a problem that requires exascale-class computing performance currently beyond the capabilities of existing systems. Significant advances in power-efficiency are necessary to make such a system practical to field.