Processor Partitioning: An Experimental Performance Analysis of Parallel Applications on SMP Cluster Systems

Currently, clusters of shared memory Symmetric MultiProcessors (SMPs) are one of the most common parallel computing systems, for which some existing environments have between 8 to 32 processors per node. Examples of such environments include some supercomputers: DataStar p655 (P655 and P655m) and P690 at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, and Seaborg and Bassi at the DOE National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. In this paper, the authors quantify the performance gap resulting from using different number of processors per node for application execution (for which they use the term processor partitioning), and conduct detailed performance experiments to identify the major application characteristics that affect processor partitioning.