Barrier-breaking performance for industrial problems on the CRAY C916

Nine applications, including third-party codes, were submitted to the Gordon Bell Prize committee showing the CRAY C916 supercomputer providing record-breaking time to solution for industrial problems in several disciplines. Performance was obtained by balancing raw hardware speed; effective use of large, real, shared memory; compiler vectorization and autotasking; hand optimization; asynchronous I/O techniques; and new algorithms. The highest GFLOPS performance for the submissions was 11.1 GFLOPS out of a peak advertised performance of 16 GFLOPS for the CRAY C916 system. One program achieved a 15.45 speedup from the compiler with just two hand-inserted directives to scope variables properly for the mathematical library. New I/O techniques hide tens of gigabytes of I/O behind parallel computations. Finally, new iterative solver algorithms have demonstrated times to solution on 1 CPU as high as 70 times faster than the best direct solvers.