SCIENCE

E.T. International, Inc. (ETI) has announced significant speed improvements of the Graph 500 benchmarks on the Intel Endeavor supercomputer when using ETI’s SWARM (SWift Adaptive Runtime Machine) system software.  

ETI’s SWARM runtime system improves the Graph 500 execution time by up to 11-fold over MPI, vaulting it into the top two on the current Graph 500 list.  Specifically, at 256 nodes (Scale 33), it delivers 6.9 giga-edges per second (GE/s), and at 128 nodes (Scale 32), 4.2 GE/s.

“ETI has been working with Intel to deliver a runtime system meant for the most advanced many-core systems in the world,” said Rich Collier, COO of ETI.  “Our proven experience in software system design for many-core heterogeneous architectures has allowed us to implement Graph 500 with SWARM to demonstrate the enabling power of our programming environment.  We are very proud to prove the efficiency and speed of our SWARM technology with these performance numbers for Endeavor, and we look forward to continuing to achieve benchmark performances like these as we bring the system software to the rest of the world’s top supercomputers.”

The Graph 500 is designed to test computers’ ability to solve the complex, data-intensive problems common to social networks, international security, and medical records where they are required to store and transfer significant amounts of data in irregular, rapidly changing communication patterns.  Rather than measuring the ability to perform a large number of basic arithmetic operations, the Graph 500 provides a performance metric for a more sophisticated capability to handle the increasingly complex problems presented by today’s applications.

As a software partner in the Intel-led team for DARPA’s Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, ETI developed the SWARM runtime system technology for the UHPC initiative and improved the Graph 500 benchmark performance on the Endeavor supercomputer by using this system software instead of MPI.  Intel’s UHPC team, jointly funded by Intel and DARPA, includes ETI Vice President of R&D Dr. Rishi Khan among its principal investigators.

“Intel Labs has been excited to work with ETI to prepare for high core count computers and systems,” said Wilfred Pinfold, Director of Extreme Scale Systems, Intel Corporation.  “The challenge is to efficiently utilize those cores balancing both energy consumption and application performance.  ETI's SWARM demonstrates that a new runtime based on codelets can effectively utilize those cores and will scale to billions of cores in a system.”