Awards

HPC Challenge Award at Supercomputing 2006
IBM dominated the annual HPC Challenge Competition again at Supercomputing 2006. The DOE/NNSA/LLNL team using IBMs Blue Gene/L system; swept all four Class 1 benchmark awards (Global HPL, Global RandomAccess, EP Stream (Triad) and Global FFT) and shared the Class 2 "elegant" implementation award. The HPC Challenge (HPCC) is a suite of seven benchmarks used for evaluating the performance of supercomputers. Each benchmark is designed to measure a specific aspect of the system performance. The optimizations for the Global RandomAccess benchmark, which won the award for the second time in a row, were done by Yogish Sabharwal and Rahul Garg at the India Research Lab -- achieving a performance of more than 35 Giga updates per second, beating the closest competitor by a factor of 4. This benchmark measures the peak capacity of the memory subsystem while performing random updates to the global system memory. Behind the optimizations, lies a clever algorithm that makes effective use of the limited resources (buffer space) available by routing the memory updates via other nodes.