ACADEMIA

ScaleMP announced that the “Zeus-vSMP” system at the ACC Cyfronet Polish Supercomputing and Networking Center, is the largest vSMP Foundation virtual SMP in Europe to date, has demonstrated outstanding performance.

Cyfronet deployed over 700 blades leveraging vSMP Foundation, allowing it to create virtual SMPs with up to 768 cores and 6 TB RAM. This virtual SMP system uses Intel’s cost effective Xeon 5600 processor series and achieved the highest performance measured for a system with this processor in the following benchmarks:

Over 2.25 TB/s sustainable memory bandwidth as measured by the STREAM benchmark. This result is the 3rd highest result ever recorded for all processors; SPECint_rate_base2006 of 13600 as measured by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) INT RATE benchmark. This is the 3rd highest result for all processors; SPECfp_rate_base2006 of 9800 as measured by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) FP RATE benchmark. This is the 5th highest result for all processors.

In addition, the virtual SMP system at Cyfronet demonstrated excellent scaling for OpenMP research applications:

Over 75% efficiency at 756 cores for an OpenMP-based implementation of the LANCZOS algorithm for eigenvalues calculation, compared to a 128 core configuration; Over 7 times higher performance for MHD3D magneto-hydrodynamic, compared to a 4-socket, 32 core, Intel Xeon 7500 processor series system.

“We purchased vSMP Foundation under the POWIEW project which addresses grand computing challenges in science and technology. Now, thanks to vSMP Foundation we are able to offer more HPC capabilities to the Polish scientists' community,” said Professor Kazimierz Wiatr, the director of the ACC Cyfronet AGH. “Our users appreciate scalability and flexibility of configuration that our new machine features. At last, users can be exclusively provided with as many SMP resources as they needed. The huge shared memory available by ‘Zeus SMP' is also what users mostly urged for in the past."

”It’s not often that a research organization demonstrates such stellar results,” said Shai Fultheim, ScaleMP’s Founder and CEO. “It simply proves that by using vSMP Foundation, organizations worldwide can gain top performance by aggregating their x86 machines to a single virtual SMP for all types of research.”