Archived: 30 January 2006
Published in Proc. of Workshop on Performance Modeling, Evaluation, and Optimization of Parallel and Distributed Systems (PMEO-PDS'06), Rhodes, Greece, April 2006.
The results produced by five different MPI bench-mark programs on an SGI Altix 3700 are analyzed and compared. There are significant differences in the results for some MPI operations. We investigate the reasons for these discrepancies, which are due to differences in the measurement techniques, implementation details and default configurations of the different benchmarks. The variation in results on the Altix are generally much greater than on a distributed memory machine, due pri-marily to the ccNUMA architecture and the importance of cache effects, as well as some implementation details of the SGI MPI libraries.