Leveraging its coveted high-performance computing (HPC) architecture to claim yet another world record, a Silicon Graphics Altix 4700 system has achieved a sustained memory bandwidth of 4.35 Terabytes (TB) per second in STREAM Triad benchmark tests.

The feat was achieved on an SGI Altix 4700 system powered by 1,024 Intel Itanium 2 processors running under a single copy of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell with SGI ProPack 5 for Linux. The configuration, which includes 4TB of system memory, is the largest single system image (SSI) attainable on a Linux OS system.

The world record was posted in late July on the STREAM Triad Top 20 page at www.cs.virginia.edu/ stream/ top20/ Bandwidth.html, after the results were achieved and validated June 1 on an SGI Altix 4700 system now installed at the Leibniz Computing Centre Munich (LRZ).

The Top 20 list also reveals that SGI Altix handily outperforms systems from IBM, HP, Cray, NEC and Sun. HPC codes require a balance between the processor and memory subsystem to maintain a constant flow of data. STREAM is a highly regarded performance metric that measures the sustainable memory bandwidth, or flow, of a computing system.

SGI's latest STREAM Triad achievement is four times faster than the previously held record of 1 TB/sec, which also was attained on an SGI Altix system, but one powered by 512 processors.

SGI scored both world records using an OpenMP, or shared-memory, version of the STREAM Triad benchmark. Many vendors tout results achieved using the MPI version of STREAM Triad, which puts severe limitations on memory access that can hamper the performance of a significant set of HPC applications. In contrast, SGI's NUMAflex™ shared-memory architecture allows all the processors in the computer to share the same memory. This results in faster processing and easier programming.

SGI Altix systems rank No. 1 and No. 2 among all posted systems in the STREAM Triad Top 20 list of shared-memory systems. The closest performing systems from listed competitors are:

• NEC_SX-7 with STREAM Triad score of 872259.1 Mb/sec
• HP_AlphaServer_GS1280 with STREAM Triad score of 431450.0 Mb/sec
• Cray_T932_321024-3E with STREAM Triad score of 359270.0 Mb/sec
• IBM_eServer_p5-595 with STREAM Triad score of 174567.4 Mb/sec
• Sun_F25K with STREAM Triad score of 75402.7 Mb/sec
  
  

Details on all STREAM Triad results are available at www.cs.virginia.edu/ stream/ top20/ Bandwidth.html.