Performance Characteristics of OpenMP Constructs, and Applications Benchmarks on a Large Symmetric Multiprocessor

With the increasing popularity of small to large-scale symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems, there has been a dire need to have sophisticated, and flexible development and runtime environments for efficient and rapid development of parallel applications. To this end, OpenMP has emerged as the standard for parallel programming on shared-memory systems. It is very important to evaluate the performance of OpenMP constructs, kernels, and application benchmarks on large-scale SMP systems. We present the performance of the basic OpenMP constructs, class B of NAS OpenMP 3.0 benchmarks, and the SPEC OMPL2001 application benchmarks (large data set) on a contemporary 72-node Sun Fire 15K SMP node. We report the basic timings, scalability, and runtime profiles of different parallel regions within each benchmark in the NAS OpenMP 3.0, and the SPEC OMPL2001 suites. We elaborate on the performance differences between the medium and large classes of the SPEC OMP2001 suites on our system, as well as a comparison among a number of large-scale symmetric multiprocessors for the SPEC OMPL2001.