Early Systems Evaluations at ORNL

v2-10/19/98

Years before DOE established the Evaluation of Early Systems (EES) project, ORNL researchers were actively involved in the design and evaluation of high performance computing systems (many of which were serial number 1 machines). This activity encompassed both systems sited at ORNL:

Intel iPSC/1, 2, 860, GP Paragons, MP Paragons
Sequent Balance 8000
Cogent, nCUBE-1, nCUBE 6400, IBM SP-2
Kendall Square KSR1-32 and KSR1-64
SGI multiprocessor systems

and systems located elsewhere, but important to ORNL computational science applications:

Cray T3D, T3E
HP/Convex SPP1200 and SPP2000
Intel Touchstone Delta
Ametek S14, CM-2, CM-5
IBM SP-1

Wrestling with raw bits, researchers developed tools that allowed others who followed to do the same tasks more easily:

Benchmarking methodologies (ParkBench, PSTSWM)
Performance measurement, analysis, and visualization (PICL, ParaGraph, XPVM)
Performance characterization and modeling