Abstract
Supercomputer design is a complex, multi-dimensional optimization process,
wherein several subsystems need to be reconciled to meet a desired figure of
merit performance for a portfolio of applications and a budget constraint.
However, overall, the HPC community has been gravitating towards ever more
FLOPS, at the expense of many other subsystems.
To draw attention to overall system balance, in this paper, we analyze balance
ratios and architectural trends in the world's most powerful supercomputers.
Specifically, we have collected performance characteristics of systems between
1993 and 2018 based on the Top500 lists, and then analyzed their architectures
from diverse system design perspectives. Notably, our analysis studies the
performance balance of the machines, across a variety of subsystems such as
compute, memory, I/O, interconnect, intra-node connectivity and power. Our
analysis reveals that balance ratios of the various subsystems need to be
considered carefully alongside the application workload portfolio to provision
the subsystem capacity and bandwidth specifications, which can help achieve
optimal performance.