The MareNostrum is a large PowerPC cluster installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and was ranked fourth in the November 2005 Top500 list. This article presents an evaluation of the MareNostrum from the individual components to the final performance delivered for real applications. Beyond just reporting the achieved performance metrics, the paper aims to develop models of the machine and applications. The results of microbenchmarks and parameter fits based on simulations with Dimemas are used to generate the models. Such characterizations prove very useful to properly predict and understand the observed behavior and extrapolate expectations.
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