Early Performance Evaluation of New Six-Core Intel® Xeon® 5600 Family Processors for HPC

In this paper we take a look at what the newest member of the Intel Xeon Processor family, code named Westmere brings to high performance computing. We compare three generations of Intel Xeon based systems and present a performance evolutions based on 16 node clusters based on these CPUs respectively. We compare CPU generations utilizing dual socket platforms and a cluster across a number of HPC benchmarks and focused on different performance field and aspect. We will evaluate also technologies and features like Intel’s Hyper Threading Technology (HT) and Intel Turbo Boost Technology (Turbo Mode) and the performance implication of these technologies for HPC.