Complex version of high performance computing LINPACK benchmark (HPL)

  • Authors:
  • R. F. Barrett;T. H. F. Chan;E. F. D'Azevedo;E. F. Jaeger;K. Wong;R. Y. Wong

  • Affiliations:
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, U.S.A.;Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, U.S.A.;Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, U.S.A.;Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, University of Tennessee, TN, U.S.A.;Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

  • Venue:
  • Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper describes our effort to enhance the performance of the AORSA fusion energy simulation program through the use of high-performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark, commonly used in ranking the top 500 supercomputers. The algorithm used by HPL, enhanced by a set of tuning options, is more effective than that found in the ScaLAPACK library. Retrofitting these algorithms, such as look-ahead processing of pivot elements, into ScaLAPACK is considered as a major undertaking. Moreover, HPL is configured as a benchmark, but only for real-valued coefficients. We therefore developed software to convert HPL for use within an application program that generates complex coefficient linear systems. Although HPL is not normally perceived as a part of an application, our results show that the modified HPL software brings a significant increase in the performance of the solver when simulating the highest resolution experiments thus far configured, achieving 87.5 TFLOPS on over 20 000 processors on the Cray XT4. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.