Performance analysis of Intel multiprocessors using astrophysics simulations

This paper provides a performance evaluation and investigation of the astrophysics code FLASH for a variety of Intel multiprocessors. This work was performed at the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) on behalf of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) as a study preliminary to the acquisition of a high-performance computing (HPC) system at the CIW and for the NCCS itself to measure the relative performance of a recently acquired Intel Nehalem-based system against previously installed multicore HPC resources. A brief overview of computer performance evaluation is provided, followed by a description of the systems under test, a description of the FLASH test problem, and the test results. Additionally, the paper characterizes some of the effects of load imbalance imposed by adaptive mesh refinement. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.