High Resolution Aerospace Applications using the NASA Columbia Supercomputer
SC '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Simultaneous multithreading on x86_64 systems: an energy efficiency evaluation
HotPower '11 Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Power-Aware Computing and Systems
An early performance analysis of POWER7-IH HPC systems
Proceedings of 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
SC '13 Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Unified performance and power modeling of scientific workloads
E2SC '13 Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Energy Efficient Supercomputing
A performance comparison of current HPC systems: Blue Gene/Q, Cray XE6 and InfiniBand systems
Future Generation Computer Systems
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In this paper, we present an early performance evaluation of a 624-core cluster based on the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5560 (code named "Nehalem-EP", and referred to as Xeon 5560 in this paper)---the third-generation quad-core architecture from Intel. This is the first processor from Intel with a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture managed by on-chip integrated memory controller. It employs a point-to-point interconnect called the Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) between processors and to the input/output (I/O) hub. It also introduces to a quad-core architecture both Intel's hyper-threading technology (or simultaneous multi-threading, "SMT") and Intel® Turbo Boost Technology ("Turbo mode") that automatically allow processor cores to run faster than the base operating frequency if the processor is operating below rated power, temperature, and current specification limits. It can be engaged with any number of cores or logical processors enabled and active. We critically evaluate these features using the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmarks, NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), and four full-scale scientific applications. We compare and contrast the results of a cluster based on the Xeon 5560 with an SGI® Altix® ICE 8200EX cluster of quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5472 Processor ("Xeon 5472" from here on) and another cluster of Intel® Xeon® 5462 Processor ("Xeon 5462"; the Xeon 5400 Series Processors are previous generation quad-core Intel processors and were code named Harpertown).