A static and dynamic workload characterization study of the San Diego Supercomputer center Cray X-MP

Abstract

The San Diego Supercomputer Center is one of four NSF sponsored national supercomputer centers. Up until January of 1990, its workhorse was a Cray X-MP, which served 2700 researchers from 170 institutions, spanning 44 states. In order to better understand how this supercomputer was utilized by its diverse community of users, we undertook a workload characterization study of the Cray X-MP. The goals of our study were twofold. First, we wished to characterize the workload at both the functional and resource levels. The functional level represents the user point of view: what types of programs users are running on the system. The resource level represents the system point of view: how the systems resources (CPU, memory, I/O bandwidth) are being used. Second, we wanted to see how the workload changed over an average weekday. Thus, we conducted a static characterization to understand its global attributes over the entire measurement period, as well as a dynamic workload characterization to understand the time behavior of the workload over a weekday cycle.