Performance and Scalability of OpenMP Programs on the Sun FireTM E25K Throughput Computing Server

• Published in: Shared Memory Parallel Programming with Open MP pp. 19 - 28
• Main Authors: Lee, Myungho, Whitney, Brian, Copty, Nawal
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2005
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Automatic Parallelization; High Clock Frequency; Master Thread; Parallel Region; Peak Ratio
• ISBN: 354024560X; 9783540245605
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-31832-3_3

The Sun FireTM K is the first generation of high-end servers built to the Throughput Computing strategy of Sun Microsystems. The server can scale up to 72 UltraSPARC® IV processors with Chip MultiThreading (CMT) technology, and execute up to 144 threads simultaneously. The Sun StudioTM 9 software includes compilers and tools that provide support for the C, C++, and Fortran OpenMP Version 2.0 specifications, and that fully exploit the capabilities of the UltraSPARC IV processor and the E25K server. This paper gives an overview of the Sun Fire E25K server and OpenMP support in the Sun Studio 9 software. The paper presents the latest world-class SPEC OMPL benchmark results on the Sun Fire E25K, and compares these results with those on the UltraSPARC III Cu based Sun Fire 15K server. Results show that base and peak ratios for the SPEC OMPL benchmarks increase by approximately 50% on the Sun Fire E25K server, compared to a Sun Fire 15K server with the same number of processors and with higher clock frequency.