Initial performance evaluation of the Cray SeaStar interconnect

Abstract

The Cray SeaStar is a new network interface and router for the Cray Red Storm and XT3 supercomputer. The SeaStar was designed specifically to meet the performance and reliability needs of a large-scale, distributed-memory scientific computing platform. In this paper, we present an initial performance evaluation of the SeaStar. We first provide a detailed overview of the hardware and software features of the SeaStar, followed by the results of several low-level micro-benchmarks. These initial results indicate that SeaStar is on a path to achieving its performance targets.