Performance Comparison of Cray X 1 and Cray Opteron Cluster with Other Leading Platforms using HPCC and IMB Benchmarks

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite and the Intel MPI Benchmark (IMB) are used to compare and evaluate the combined performance of processor, memory subsystem and interconnect fabric of six leading supercomputers SGI Altix BX2, Cray X1, Cray Opteron Cluster, Dell Xeon cluster, NEC SX-8 and IBM Blue Gene/L. These six systems use also six different networks (SGI NUMALINK4, Cray network, Myrinet, InfiniBand, NEC IXS and IBM Blue Gen/L Torus). The complete set of HPCC benchmarks are run on each of these systems. Additionally, we present Intel MPI Benchmarks (IMB) results to study the performance of 11 MPI communication functions on five of these systems.