Olumide Olusanya, Systems Engineer at Dell
Over at the Dell HPC Blog, Olumide Olusanya and Munira Hussain have posted an interesting comparison of FDR and EDR InfiniBand.
In the first post, we shared OSU Micro-Benchmarks (latency and bandwidth) and HPL performance between FDR and EDR Infiniband. In this part, we will further compare performance using additional real-world applications such as ANSYS Fluent, WRF, and NAS Parallel Benchmarks. In both blogs, we have shown several micro-benchmark and real-world application results to compare FDR with EDR Infiniband.
From Figure 1 above, EDR shows a wide performance advantage over FDR as the number of cores increase to 80. We continue to see an even wider difference as the cluster scales. While FDR’s performance seems to gradually taper off after 80 cores, EDR’s performance continues to scale as the number of cores increase and performs 85% better than FDR on 320 cores (16 nodes).
“From these results, EDR has shown a higher performance and better scaling than FDR on our 16-node Dell PowerEdge C6320 cluster. Also, some applications have shown a wider performance margin between these interconnects than other applications. This is because of the nature of the applications being tested; communication intensive applications will definitely perform and scale better with a faster network when compared with compute-intensive applications. Furthermore, because of our cluster size, we were only able to test the scalability of the applications on 16 servers (320 cores). In the future, we plan on running these tests again on a larger cluster to further test the performance difference between EDR and FDR.”
