Inproceedings,
Understanding the Impact of Multi-Core Architecture in Cluster Computing: A Case Study with Intel Dual-Core System
The 7th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2007), May 2007, (2007)
Abstract
Multi-core processor is a growing industry trend as single
core processors rapidly reach the physical limits of possible
complexity and speed. In the new Top500 supercomputer list, more than 20% processors belong to multi-core processor family. However, without an in-depth study on application behaviors and trends on multi-core cluster, we might not be able to understand the characteristics of multicore
cluster in a comprehensive manner and hence not be
able to get optimal performance. In this paper, we take
on the challenges and design a set of experiments to study
the impact of multi-core architecture on cluster computing.
We choose to use one of the most advanced multi-core
servers, Intel Bensley system with Woodcrest processors, as
our evaluation platform, and use popular benchmarks including
HPL, NAMD, and NAS as the applications to study.
From our message distribution experiments, we nd that on
an average about 50% messages are transferred through
intra-node communication, which is much higher than intuition.
This trend indicates that optimizing intra-node communication
is as important as optimizing inter-node communication
in a multi-core cluster. We also observe that
cache and memory contention may be a potential bottleneck
in multi-core cluster, and communication middleware
and applications should be multi-core aware to alleviate
this problem. We demonstrate that multi-core aware algorithm,
e.g. data tiling, improves benchmark execution time
by up to 70%. We also compare the scalability of multicore
cluster with that of single-core cluster and nd that the
scalability of multi-core cluster is promising.
