Communication and computation performance of the CM-5

The Thinking Machines CM-5 is one of the first of a new generation of massively parallel systems. To assess the scalability of the CM-5's computation and interprocessor communication rates, a series of benchmarks was used to measure the performance of the CM-5 data and control networks, the node vector units, and the balance of computation and communication. At the application level, the achievable communication bandwidth and processing rates were found to be roughly 50% and 40%, respectively, of the corresponding theoretical peak rates. The early assessment is that the CM-5 is scalable but that a better balance of communication and processing rates would increase its effectiveness.