-
One of the complexities in benchmarking applications is defining the server configuration adequately. The purpose of a benchmark is to provide guidance - to demonstrate how to obtain a given performance from a specific application workload. This guidance is not useful if the performance cannot be reproduced...
-
This week, I am attending the annual SC08 conference. For 2 decades, the tradition in HPC is to announce and demonstrate new products at the SC conference, and there is a lot to absorb. For me, the event started with a 2-day HP user conference, attracting some of HP’s largest HPC customers. It was a...
Posted to
Reality Check: Server Insights
by
d-field
on
11-18-2008
Filed under:
Filed under: HPC, cooling, power, container, servers, datacenter, HP POD, pod, x86, multi-core processor, AMD
-
Given that it is important to measure power usage and correlate it to application performance, how do you measure the power? We use 2 different methods - one for rack-mounted servers and another for blade servers. The rack-mounted servers do not provide power meters, so we bought a power meter. We plug...
-
Until a couple of years ago, when we referred to performance measurement of an application, we meant the amount of time that it took the job to run vs. the specific resources it used - number of cores, number of servers if you are using a cluster, the specific characteristics of the server cores and...
-
In some situations, it is useful to not use some of the cores on a server. Since most processors do not have sufficient memory BW to support a memory BW-intensive code running on all cores, such codes do not "scale" perfectly. There are 2 common ways to define scaling - serial-job throughput...
-
The lmbench memory latency benchmark gave us a lot of information about the new system. Next, we ran the STREAM memory BW benchmark suite. Before running HPC codes, we needed to ensure that hardware multi-threading is disabled, if it exists. This feature allows each core on the server to appear to the...
-
Now that we have configured the hardware components and firmware settings in a known and hopefully optimum way, it is time to run the 1 st performance test. Personally, I like to run the memory bandwidth benchmark lmbench first, since there is a lot to learn from it. This benchmark computes the time...
-
Today's work needed to be done before we can do any code performance testing: First, we configured the memory. I received half as many memory DIMMs as the system can hold, and I searched for the person who could tell me which memory slots to use for best performance. After this step was completed...
-
After the operating system boots on a new server model, it's time to start performance testing. I'm hoping to get some comments on this, since there are many different ways to proceed. Personally, I am not a fan of industry standard benchmarks, but I think they are the best starting point for...
-
About this blog series - This is the 1 st posting of a series which describes the experiences of engineers who test the performance of HPC servers and server clusters at HP. My name is Dave Field. I lead an engineering group at HP - we measure the performance of new HP servers. In addition to the common...