Experiences in scaling scientific applications on current-generation quad-core processors

In this work we present an initial performance evaluation of AMD and Intel's first quad-core processor offerings: the AMD Barcelona and the Intel Xeon X7350. We examine the suitability of these processors in quad-socket compute nodes as building blocks for large-scale scientific computing clusters. Our analysis of intra-processor and intra-node scalability of microbenchmarks and a range of large- scale scientific applications indicates that quad-core processors can deliver an improvement in performance of up to 4x per processor but is heavily dependent on the workload being processed. While the Intel processor has a higher clock rate and peak performance, the AMD processor has higher memory bandwidth and intra-node scalability. The scientific applications we analyzed exhibit a range of performance improvements from only 3x up to the full 16x speed-up over a single core. Also, we note that the maximum node performance is not necessarily achieved by using all 16 cores.