Performance evaluation of the intel sandy bridge based NASA pleiades using scientific and engineering applications

Abstract

We present a performance evaluation of Pleiades based on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor, a fourth-generation eight-core Sandy Bridge architecture, and compare it with the previous third generation Nehalem architecture. Several architectural features have been incorporated in Sandy Bridge: (a) four memory channels as opposed to three in Nehalem; (b) memory speed increased from 1333 MHz to 1600 MHz; (c) ring to connect on-chip L3 cache with cores, system agent, memory controller, and QPI agent and I/O controller to increase the scalability; (d) new AVX unit with wider vector registers of 256 bit; (e) integration of PCI-Express 3.0 controllers into the I/O subsystem on chip; (f) new Turbo Boost version 2.0 where base frequency of processor increased from 2.6 to 3.2 GHz; and (g) QPI link rate from 6.4 to 8 GT/s and two QPI links to second socket. We critically evaluate these new features using several low-level benchmarks, and four full-scale scientific and engineering applications.