Preliminary Results of a Scalability Study on the ARL MSRC's Large-Scale Clusters

Within the past few months a 2048 processor Linux Networx (LNXI) Xeon Linux cluster and a 2304 processor IBM Opteron cluster were installed at the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (ARL MSRC) to augment the center’s current unclassified and classified scientific application processing capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the scalablity performance of these systems on a suite of vendor applications currently receiving significant utilization on the ARL MSRC platforms. The following application codes were used: GAMESS, COBALT, OVERFLOW2, ALE3D, and GASP. Each code was benchmarked using 256, 512, 768 processors, etc. until it no longer scaled.