Crisis in HPC Discussion - Lyndon J Clarke, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre

Newsgroups: uk.org.epsrc.hpc.discussion
From: lyndon@epcc.ed.ac.uk (L J Clarke)
Subject: Re: Crisis-in-HPC conclusions
Organization: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
Distribution: uk
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 16:58:52 GMT

Efficiency of T3D - it's my experience that the performance of T3D programs is determined by the efficiency of the single processor performance. People are reporting efficiencies in the region of 17%, and this is more or less just the single node efficiencies that codes are seeing. Its really got nothing to do with MPP aspects of T3D, its to do with memory hierarchies.
Efficiency of HPC resources - perhaps I have an unconventional opinion, but I do think that in the case of research council HPC resources the important thing is the research and publications that arise from use of the resources. Really, its a question of how much science (or other, as appropriate) one obtains for the money invested, and what the money happened to be invested in is largely neither here no there. Are there any data on research publications arising from use of HPC and other central resources in the UK?
Efficiency of scarce resources - this was also a theme in the conclusions. The point made was that we must use the resources efficiently in order to increase the response time of resources. - ie so that ou jobs spend less time waiting in queues. Now, if all of our programs ran, say, four times faster on the T3D then I do think we would all submit four times as much work, and our jobs would spend just as long waiting in queues as they do today. Is there any data on this? I naively would have thought there could be, since as central resources have been upgraded to faster systems its really the same as the same old slower system with more efficient programs.

Well, that's my 3p worth for now.

Best Wishes
Lyndon

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|e||)| Lyndon J Clarke    Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre  |  Cymru |
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