Scali demonstrates that the choice of MPI is three times more important than the selection of compilers

Marlborough, MA, - April 01, 2008 - Scali, the leader in higher performance computing software, today announced new benchmark results provided by Scali using the SPEC MPI2007 benchmark suite on the newly released Scali MPI Connect version 5.6.1. As of today’s release, Scali cements its leadership and has the highest SPECmpiM_base2007 score for all systems ranging from 32 to 128 cores. Further, as a courtesy to the industry, Scali has submitted results using different compilers, enabling studies of which cluster components truly provide differential performance benefits. For a 32-node cluster system using 128 cores, the results show the compiler difference to be a modest 6 percent. However, on similarly equipped systems, these new results show that Scali MPI Connect extracts 18 percent more performance than HP-MPI(1).

“It is our top priority to deliver the best performing MPI in the industry and the newly submitted results underscore that commitment. Out of the 13 applications which constitute the SPEC MPI2007 medium suite running on 32 nodes and 128 cores, three of the applications performed within +/- 2 percent as compared to a similar system using HP-MPI. All the other 10 applications perform significant faster with Scali MPI Connect. For example the Quantum Chemistry application Socorro performs 21 percent faster with Scali MPI Connect. Additionally, the result for the POP2 benchmark, a climate modeling test using the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) showed a 336 percent performance advantage over the HP-MPI based system.”, said Hakon Bugge, CTO of Scali. “We will continue our leadership role in providing the HPC community with the data they need to make important technology decisions. The choice is clear, over all; Scali MPI Connect is the best performing MPI in the market.”




SPEC MPI2007

SPEC MPI2007 is SPEC’s benchmark suite for evaluating MPI-parallel, floating point, and compute intensive performance across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware. MPI2007 continues the SPEC tradition of giving HPC users the most objective and representative benchmark suite for measuring the performance of SMP (shared memory multi-processor) systems. SPEC reviews and publishes submitted results on their website at: http://www.spec.org/mpi2007/results/. SPEC® and the benchmark name SPEC MPI® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of April 1, 2008.

About Scali and Scali MPI Connect

Founded in 1997, Scali is the leading developer of a fully integrated message passing interface (MPI) library that enables companies to take advantage of premier interconnect technologies to build high performance clusters. Scali MPI Connect is designed to enable applications to run at maximum performance through its unique, high performance, patent pending technology. Scali MPI Connect supports a wide range of customer environments while lowering the number of binaries required, and delivers superior application performance. Hundreds of companies, including Goodyear, Daimler AG, Lockheed Martin, US Army and Naval Air, Schlumberger and Shell benefit from using Scali’s MPI libraries. The company is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts with research and development in Oslo, Norway and Nagpur, India. Visit www.scali.com for more information.

.
© 2008 Scali, Inc., All rights reserved. Scali and Scali MPI Connect are trademarks of Scali, Inc. All other service marks, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

(1) The two systems labeled “HP Proliant BL460c blade Cluster Platform 3000BL” and “LS-1, Scali MPI Connect 5.6.1, Intel 9.1 compilers”, are both using Mellanox based Infiniband DDR HCAs, dual-core Intel Xeon 5160 processors and Intel 9.1 compilers. Using 32 nodes and 128 cores, the HP-MPI based system delivers a SPECmpiM(TM)_base2007 score of 11.9. The Scali MPI Connect based system delivers 14.0 using the same metric, i.e., 18 percent higher score.

Contact Information

Hakon Bugge

CTO

Scali, Inc.

Contact via E-mail