Performance evaluation of the SX-6 vector architecture for scientific computations

Abstract

The growing gap between sustained and peak performance for scientific applications is a well-known problem in high performance computing. The recent development of parallel vector systems offers the potential to reduce this gap for many computational science codes and deliver a substantial increase in computing capabilities. This paper examines the intranode performance of the NEC SX-6 vector processor, and compares it against the cache-based IBM Power3 and Power4 superscalar architectures, across a number of key scientific computing areas. First, we present the performance of a microbenchmark suite that examines many low-level machine characteristics. Next, we study the behavior of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. Finally, we evaluate the performance of several scientific computing codes. Overall results demonstrate that the SX-6 achieves high performance on a large fraction of our application suite and often significantly outperforms the cache-based architectures. However, certain classes of applications are not easily amenable to vectorization and would require extensive algorithm and implementation reengineering to utilize the SX-6 effectively.