Archived: 30 January 2006
Published in
Proc. of APAC'05, Gold Coast, Sep 2005.
We report measurements of the MPI message-passing communications performance of the SGI Altix 3700, and provide some comparisons with the AlphaServer SC with Quadrics interconnect, which will be of particular interest to users of the APAC National Facility. The measurements are done using MPIBench, which takes into account the effects of contention in point-to-point communications, and can also generate distributions of communication times, not just averages. These are the first results of using MPIBench on a large shared memory machine. We also compare the results of MPIBench with other MPI benchmark programs, and find that differences in the measurement techniques of the different benchmarks can lead to significantly different results on a shared memory machine such as the Altix.