NASA: High Performance Fast Computing Challenge

Re:NASA: High Performance Fast Computing Challenge by Twirrim on Thursday May 04, 2017 @04:19PM (#14268399)

This will add complexity to the challenge somewhat: The cluster uses a mix of E5-2680v4 (Broadwell), E5-2680v3 (Haswell), E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge), and E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) processors.

Each generation has brought different optimisations, tweaked instruction sets, and performance characteristics. You'll have to optimise for the most common scenario.

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Re:NASA: High Performance Fast Computing Challenge by rootbear on Thursday May 04, 2017 @11:04PM (#14270843)

This is a common problem with modern supercomputers, which are all clusters of some sort. We have a supercomputer at NASA Goddard, much smaller than Pleiades, that gets new "Scalable Units" every few years. The first parts of it are now long gone and what's there is a mix of several recent generations of Intel CPU and some Intel Phis. I'm told that some codes run better on the older CPUs due to caching and other architectural issues.

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