NEC SX-4 performance testing paper published

At Supercomputing 96 last November in Pittsburgh, Steve Hammond of SCD gave a well-attended presentation of a paper that arose from SCD's recent supercomputer procurement effort. Written by Hammond and Richard Loft of SCD's Computational Science Section and Philip D. Tannenbaum of HNSX Supercomputers, Inc., printed copies of the paper "sold out" repeatedly from NCAR's research booth on the exhibit floor of the supercomputing conference.

"Architecture and Application: The Performance of the NEC SX-4 on the NCAR Benchmark Suite" is also published on the web at http://www.scd.ucar.edu/css/publications/sc96.html.

The paper:

• Describes the architecture of the SX-4 which has an 8.0 ns clock cycle and a peak performance of 2 GFLOPS per processor

• Describes the composition of the NCAR Benchmark Suite, designed to evaluate computers for use on climate modeling applications

• Contrasts the NCAR Benchmark Suite with other benchmarks

• Details the scalability and performance of the SX-4/32 relative to the NCAR Benchmark Suite