The Cray MTA-2 system provides exceptional performance on a variety of sparse graph algorithms. Unfortunately, it was an extremely expensive platform. Cray is preparing an Eldorado platform that leverages the Cray XT3 network and system infrastructure while integrating a new revision of the MTA-2 processors that is pin compatible with the AMD Opteron socket. Unlike the MTA-2, this platform will have a more constrained network bisection bandwidth and will pay a high penalty for random memory accesses. This work assesses the hardware level scalability of the Eldorado platform on several graph algorithms.
Keith D. Underwood, Megan Vance, Jonathan W. Berry