Identify the Bottlenecks

To get good multinode performance, need excellent single node performance and sufficient network performance to not degrade multinode performance too much. Key to cost performance is appropriate balance. This balance is problem dependent.

Floating point performance is more easily adjustable than network performance.

Keys to Performance
 
  • Single node floating point speed
      quality of CPU

      cache performance, size

      compiler

      memory bandwidth
       
       

  • Message passing performance