A Performance Evaluation of the Nehalem Quad-Core Processor for Scientific Computing

In this work we present an initial performance evaluation of Intel's latest, secondgeneration quad-core processor, Nehalem, and provide a comparison to first-generation AMD and Intel quad-core processors Barcelona and Tigerton. Nehalem is the first Intel processor to implement a NUMA architecture incorporating QuickPath Interconnect for interconnecting processors within a node, and the first to incorporate an integrated memory controller. We evaluate the suitability of these processors in quad-socket compute nodes as building blocks for large-scale scientific computing clusters. Our analysis of intra-processor and intra-node scalability of microbenchmarks, and a range of large-scale scientific applications, indicates that quad-core processors can deliver an improvement in performance of up to 4x over a single core depending on the workload being processed. However, scalability can be less when considering a full node. We show that Nehalem outperforms Barcelona on memory-intensive codes by a factor of two for a Nehalem node with 8 cores and a Barcelona node containing 16 cores. Further optimizations are possible with Nehalem, including the use of Simultaneous Multithreading, which improves the performance of some applications by up to 50%.