A. Boklund, S. Mankefors-Christiernin, C. Jiresjö, and N. Namaki (Sweden)
Performance, evaluation, cluster, Moore's law, Linpack
In this paper we present the results from an empirical study of how the performance of a ten year old (1993) Linux cluster, performs compared to a five year old (1998) cluster and a cluster constructed from modern (2003) state of the art hardware. The study was conducted to produce an overview of the progress in the cluster/hardware industry over the last decade. We also predict the trend for the upcoming five years (2008) by extrapolation of the results and compare them to predictions made by Moore's Law. One semi-synthetic and two real-world benchmarks were used to assess the performance of the clusters: High Performance Linpack, Compilation of the Linux kernel and Cryptographic deciphering. In this study we find that it is very likely that applications scale far beyond the boundaries of Moore's Law. And a five node COTS cluster in 2008 will have a numerical capacity of 100Gflop/s.
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