Mitrion-C Application Development on SGI Altix 350/RC100

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the SGI RC100 hardware and Mitrion-C software for accelerating computational science applications, demonstrating performance improvements and discussing optimization techniques and system limitations.

Contribution

It presents the first application development and performance analysis of Mitrion-C on SGI RC100 hardware for a scientific computing test case.

Findings

Hardware and software tools are satisfactory for intensive applications

Performance varies with different code optimizations

System improvements are recommended for better efficiency

Abstract

This paper provides an evaluation of SGI RASCTM RC100 technology from a computational science software developer's perspective. A brute force implementation of a two-point angular correlation function is used as a test case application. The computational kernel of this test case algorithm is ported to the Mitrion-C programming language and compiled, targeting the RC100 hardware. We explore several code optimization techniques and report performance results for different designs. We conclude the paper with an analysis of this system based on our observations while implementing the test case. Overall, the hardware platform and software development tools were found to be satisfactory for accelerating computationally intensive applications, however, several system improvements are desirable.