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The world is entering into a revolutionary stage of parallel computing. New technologies are allowing designers to construct a general purpose parallel machine on a chip. In contrast, traditional systems are built as an array of several computers. That solution implies huge space and high power consumption.
We are comparing the new technologies and the traditional architectures using new metrics. Although this is the beginning of an exiting era, the numbers show surprising results. This project is just a little recreation of what the next generation of computers will give to users.
The Core of the Project
We are comparing a Sun Fire T2000 server and an IBM pSeries 690 parallel computer. T2000 was provided by Sun Microsystems as a part of the Try and Buy Program. The IBM machine (called Copper) is property of NCSA and they give us access to it. The main idea of the project is based on running the same application in both computers and then compare both using several metrics.
Part of this project is based on previous research done at UIC. In the previous project, we got interesting results testing the T2000 server as a parallel computer. If you want to have a better idea about what are we doing, we recommend you to visit the CoolThreads@UIC web site..
The Test Application
In order to compare two machines, we decided to run the same application on each of them. The name of the application is Teuchos and it belongs to Sandia National Laboratories. With this software we performed scientific computing operations using the parallel capabilities of the machines. For further details visit the test section.
The Metrics
Since we are comparing two machines that are completely different, we have to use metrics that allows us to understand the benefits and drawback of the devices. Some of the metrics that we are using are well known. Other metrics are new for the area and we are trying to see how effective they are. If you are interested in this topic please refer to tests section.
