Due to the increasing diversity of high-performance computing architectures, researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in comparing a code's performance and scalability across different platforms. However, there is a lack of available guidance on how to actually set up and analyze such cross-platform studies. In this paper, we contend that the natural base unit of computing for such studies is a single compute node on each platform and offer guidance in setting up, running, and analyzing node-to-node scaling studies. We propose templates for presenting scaling results of these studies and provide several case studies highlighting the benefits of this approach.
@article{arxiv.2510.12166,
title = {Comparing Cross-Platform Performance via Node-to-Node Scaling Studies},
author = {Kenneth Weiss and Thomas M. Stitt and Daryl Hawkins and Olga Pearce and Stephanie Brink and Robert N. Rieben},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.12166},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
16 pages; accepted to the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA)