Performance Analysis of the SiCortex SC072

The world of High Performance Computing (HPC) has seen a major shift towards commodity clusters in the last 10 years. A new company, SiCortex, has set out to break this trend. They have created what they claim to be a balanced cluster which makes use of low-power MIPS processors and a custom interconnect in an effort to avoid many of the bottlenecks plaguing most modern clusters. In this paper, we reveal the results of preliminary benchmarking of one of their systems, the SC072. First, we ran a collection of microbenchmarks to characterize the performance of interprocessor communication. Next, we ran some real applications relevant to high performance computing and compared performance and scalability to a typical commodity cluster. Lastly, we examine and compare the performance per watt of the SiCortex system to a commodity cluster.