HPCC RandomAccess Benchmark Highlighted in IPDPS Best Paper

HPCC RandomAccess Benchmark for Next Generation Supercomputers received Best Paper in the applications research track of the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium.

The paper examines the key elements determining the performance of the HPC Challenge RandomAccess benchmark on next generation supercomputers, including the Blue Gene/P at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). Authors Vikas Aggarwal, Yogish Sabharwal, and Rahul Garg from the IBM India Research Lab and Philip Heidelberger from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center presented a multi-core algorithm that distributes the benchmark workload on the quad-cores of each Blue Gene/P node. The algorithm gave a factor of approximately 3 speedup on the Blue Gene/P system. The ALCF won the HPCC Challenge Award at SC08 using this implementation on the Blue Gene/P. However, the load-balancing algorithm is general and can be applied to any system with k-cores by superimposing a k-1 dimensional virtual torus topology on the system.