Evaluating performance of BLAST on Intel Xeon and Itanium2 processors

High-performance computing has increasingly adopted the use of clustered Intel architecture-based servers. This increase in adoption has been largely fueled by a number of technological enhancements in the Intel architecture-based servers, primarily due to substantial improvement in the Intel processor and memory technology over the past few years. This paper compares the performance characteristics of three Dell PowerEdge (PE) servers that are based on three different Intel processor technologies. They are the PE1750 which is an IA-32 based Xeon system, PE1850 which uses the new 90nm technology Xeon processor at faster frequencies and the PE3250 which is an Itanium2 based system. BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a high performance computing application used in the field of biological research, is used as the workload for this study. The aim is to understand the performance impact of the different features associated with each processor/platform technology when running the BLAST workload.