Measurement of a Scientific Workload using the IBM Hardware Performance Monitor

This paper presents data on the performance of the NAS SP2 IBM system using RS6000 hardware monitors and a performance measurement tool. The data collected showed that the SP2 averages about 1.3 Gflops, about 3% of peak. The report provides the relative usage for the various hardware units over the entire workload measured over a 9-month period. The workload displays moderate parallelism, with the most popular choice of nodes as 16. Although the monitor data provide a good snapshot of workload performance, causal correlations regarding key performance indicators appear difficult to draw from the current data due to the absence of I/O delay measurements.