Comparing the memory system performance of the HP V-Class and SGI Origin 2000 multiprocessors using microbenchmarks and scientific applications

As processor technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, the principal performance bottleneck of shared memory systems has become the memory access latency. In order to understand the effects of cache and memory hierarchy on system latencies, performance analysts perform benchmark analysis on existing state-of-the-art multiprocessors. In this study, we present a detailed comparison of the memory system of two recent commercial ventures, the HP V-Class and the SGI Origin 2000. Our goal is to compare and contrast design techniques used in these multiprocessors to tolerate the effect of memory latency. Our experimental methodology uses microbenchmarks as well as scientific applications to characterize the user-level performance.