Performance characteristics of a cosmology package on leading HPC architectures

Abstract

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a snapshot of the Universe some 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The pattern of anisotropies in the CMB carries a wealth of information about the fundamental parameters of cosmology. Extracting this information is an extremely computationally expensive endeavor, requiring massively parallel computers and software packages capable of exploiting them. One such package is the Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package (MADCAP) which has been used to analyze data from a number of CMB experiments. In this work, we compare MADCAP performance on the vector-based Earth Simulator (ES) and Cray XI architectures and two leading superscalar systems, the IBM Power3 and Power4. Our results highlight the complex interplay between the problem size, architectural paradigm, interconnect, and vendor-supplied numerical libraries, while isolating the I/O filesystem as the key bottleneck across all the platforms. © Springer-Verlag 2004.