Parallel Performance Studies for a Parabolic Test Problem on the Cluster maya

Abstract

We report parallel performance studies on each of the three uniform portions, from 2009, 2010, and 2013, of the cluster maya in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) for a parabolic test problem given by a time-dependent, scalar, linear reaction-di usion equation in three dimensions. The results show very good performance up to 64 compute nodes on all portions and support several key conclusions: (i) The newer nodes are faster per core as well as per node, however, for most serial production code using one of the 2010 nodes with 2.8 GHz is a good default. (ii) The high-performance interconnect supports parallel scalability on at least 64 nodes near-optimally. (iii) It is often faster to use all cores on modern multi-core nodes but it is useful to track memory usage to determine if this is the case for memory-bound code.