Performance evaluation of the SGI Altix 3700

SGI recently introduced the Altix 3700. In contrast to previous SGI systems, the Altix uses a modified version of the open source Linux operating system and the latest Intel IA-64 processors, the Intel Itanium2. The Altix also uses the next generation SGI interconnect, Numalink3 and NUMAflex, which provides a NUMA, cache-coherent, shared memory, multi-processor system. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation of the SGI Altix using microbenchmarks, kernels, and mission applications. We find that the Altix provides many advantages over other non-vector machines and it is competitive with the Cray XI on a number of kernels and applications. The Altix also shows good scaling, and its globally shared memory allows users convenient parallelization with OpenMP or pthreads.