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Performance of CFD Applications on NASA Supercomputers

J. DJOMEHRI, D. JESPERSEN, J. TAFT, H. JIN, R. HOOD, P. MEHROTRA, K. TAYLOR

Abstract


We study the performance of three CFD applications of interest to NASA— Cart3D, OVERFLOW, and USM3D—on three Xeon-based SGI Altix ICE supercomputers and one Itanium-based SGI Altix 4700. The three ICE machines use different generations of Intel quad-core processors: Clovertown, Harpertown and the recently released Nehalem. We find that the Altix 4700 system does better than the Clovertown and Harpertown quad-core systems due to issues of cache size and memory bandwidth. However these challenges seem to have been addressed in the Nehalem. Also, when we compare performance in a way that attempts to compensate for large differences in cost, even the earlier quad-core systems can be more costeffective than the Altix 4700.

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