Evaluation of the Hitachi S-3800 supercomputer using six benchmarks

Abstract

The S-3000 series is the third generation of Hitachi's supercomputers. It is claimed to be currently the fastest single processor supercomputer. In this paper, we introduce the S-3000 and, using six benchmarks we designed, evaluate a member of this series of supercomputer, the top of the range S-3800, against its predecessor, the Hitachi HITAC S-820. Our purpose is to determine in what areas the S-3800 is an improvement over its predecessor. The suite of benchmarks include kernels for random number generation, elementary function computation, FFT, dense matrix operations, SOR, and list vector (scatter/gather) operations. The use of small- to medium-sized kernels, as opposed to large application benchmarks, help to better understand the behavior of the machine. Our findings support the claim that the S-3000 series is at least twice as fast as the previous generation of Hitachi supercomputers.