A Personal Supercomputer for Climate Research
We describe and analyze the performance of a cluster of personal computers dedicated to coupled climate simulations. This climate modeling system performs comparably to state-of-the-art supercomputers and yet is affordable by individual research groups, thus enabling more spontaneous application of...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
1999
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.946 http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/distribution/csgmemo/memo-425.ps.gz |
| Summary: | We describe and analyze the performance of a cluster of personal computers dedicated to coupled climate simulations. This climate modeling system performs comparably to state-of-the-art supercomputers and yet is affordable by individual research groups, thus enabling more spontaneous application of high-end numerical models to climate science. The cluster's novelty centers around the Arctic Switch Fabric and the StarT-X network interface, a system-area interconnect substrate developed at MIT. A significant fraction of the interconnect's hardware performance is made available to our climate model through an application-specific communication library. In addition to reporting the overall application performance of our cluster, we develop an analytical performance model of our application. Based on this model, we define a metric, Potential Floating-Pointing Performance, which we use to quantify the role of high-speed interconnects in determining application performance. Our results show that a highperformance interconnect, in conjunction with a light-weight application-specific library, provides efficient support for our fine-grain parallel application on an otherwise general-purpose commodity system. |
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