Communication and computation performance of the CM-5

Abstract

The Thinking Machines CM-5 is one of the first of a new generation of massively parallel systems. To assess the scalability of the CM-5's computation and interprocessor communication rates, we used a sem"es of benchmarks to measure the performance of the CM-5 data and control networks, the node vector units, and the balance of computation and communication. At the application level, we found the achievable communication bandwidth and processing rates to be roughly fifiy percent and forty percent, respectively, of the corresponding theoretical peak rates. Our early assessment is that the CM-5 is scalable but that a better balance of communication and processing rates would increase its effectiveness.