Center of supercomputer technologies represents a new high-performance computer system Parsytec Power Mouse (Video in MPEG - 2.14 Mb, Photo - 145 Kb) designed by Parsytec GmbH company.
Power Mouse is a massive-parallel accelerator of computing intended for solving of the tasks, which need increased computer facilities and have small number of disk memory exchange operations. It works with SUN-SPARC workstation. The full information about Power Mouse system can be found on home page of the company Parsytec, and features about work with PowerMouse you can read here (russian version).
2 sections of 4 processors or 1 section of 8 processors are available for users.
Power Mouse is connected to a wokrstation SUN-SPARC under the control of an operation system Solaris 2.5.1 (or higher) or SunOS 5.5.1 (or higher) through the SCSI-bridge.
Input/output interfaces can be any peripheral units, which are supported by hardware and software of used workstation. These are units with PCI, S-BUS, IDE and SCSI interfaces.
Separated nodes are placed in specialized box combining 4 such nodes. The system is scaled by increasing of number of such four-node modules.
Power Mouse is a typical MPP-system: each node has small amount of the main memory and has not any disk space. This architecture determines a class of tasks which can be solved using Power Mouse in the most effective way. First, it concerns applications requiring large computational resources and at the same time using a minimum amount of a disk space. Realization of Monte-Carlo method is a classic example of such task .
The popular package for testing of MPP-systems NAS Parallel Benchmarks consists of 8 tests oriented on various kinds of a computation. So, one of them - EP (Embarrasinghly Parallel) - decides the following problem: shaping of two-dimensional statistics from large number accidentally of numbers, distributed on the Gauss, which are generated by the best (optimum) image for each concrete computing architecture. This statement of a problem is typical for most of applications using Monte-Carlo method. The test has two classes, defined by number of the generated and treated random numbers: first - 2^28 (class A), second - twice more (class B).
The description of the test in Russian can be found in the article by D. Franzusov "An Evaluation of performance of supercomputers " in the journal "Open systems", 1995, N6.
The outcomes of testing Power Mouse with the help of EP of the test NPB (class A) and their comparison with parameters of other high-duty systems with the same number of processors (data of testing of all systems except of Power Mouse are taken from home page NAS):
| System | Execution time of the test |
Mops | Mops/proc | The version of the test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IBM SP (66/WN) | 101.2 | 5.3 | 0.7 | NPB2.2b15 |
| Cray T3E-900 | 25.8 | 20.8 | 2.6 | NPB2.3b2 |
| Cray T3E-1200 | 19.7 | 27.2 | 3.4 | NPB2.3b2 |
| SGI Origin 2000-195 | 15.4 | 34.9 | 4.4 | NPB2.3 |
| SUN Ultra Enterprise 4000 | 62.9 | 8.5 | 1.1 | NPB2.2 |
| LANL Loki P6 Linux Cluster | 121.2 | 4.4 | 0.6 | NPB2.2 |
| Power Mouse | 14.63 | 36.70 | 4.59 | NPB2.3 |
In the given test "operation" is understood as a procedure of generation of a random number. Mops - one million such operations per second, Mops/proc - Mops on one processor.
It is necessary to mark, that other tests from the same package have given much worse outcomes for Power Mouse. It is explained by features of the system architecture and confirms that Power Mouse is intended for solution of specialized tasks requiring carefully balanced and rationally made up programs.
Network name: pink.csa.ru
The system administrator:
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