4.2.1 Target hardware

The WRAPPER is designed to target as broad as possible a range of computer systems. The original development of the WRAPPER took place on a multi-processor, CRAY Y-MP system. On that system, numerical code performance and scaling under the WRAPPER was in excess of that of an implementation that was tightly bound to the CRAY systems proprietary multi-tasking and micro-tasking approach. Later developments have been carried out on uniprocessor and multi-processor Sun systems with both uniform memory access (UMA) and non-uniform memory access (NUMA) designs. Significant work has also been undertaken on x86 cluster systems, Alpha processor based clustered SMP systems, and on cache-coherent NUMA (CC-NUMA) systems such as Silicon Graphics Altix systems. The MITgcm code, operating within the WRAPPER, is also routinely used on large scale MPP systems (for example, Cray T3E and IBM SP systems). In all cases numerical code, operating within the WRAPPER, performs and scales very competitively with equivalent numerical code that has been modified to contain native optimizations for a particular system Hoe et al. [1999].

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Last update 2011-01-09