HPCS HPCchallenge Benchmark Suite
Abstract
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) HPCchallenge Benchmarks examine the performance of High Performance Computing (HPC) architectures using kernels with more challenging memory access patterns than just the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used in the Top 500 list. The HPCchallenge Benchmarks build on the HPL framework and augment the Top 500 list by providing benchmarks that bound the performance of many real applications as a function of memory access locality characteristics. The real utility of the HPCchallenge benchmarks are that architectures can be described with a wider range of metrics than just Flop/s from HPL. Even a small percentage of random memory accesses in real applications can significantly affect the overall performance of that application on architectures not designed to minimize or hide memory latency. The HPCchallenge Benchmarks includes a new metric Giga UPdates per Second and a new benchmark RandomAccess to measure the ability of an architecture to access memory randomly, i.e., with no locality. When looking only at HPL performance and the Top 500 List, inexpensive build-your-own clusters appear to be much more cost effective than more sophisticated HPC architectures. HPCchallenge Benchmarks provide users with additional information to justify policy and purchasing decisions. We will compare the measured HPCchallenge Benchmark performance on various HPC architectures from Cray XIs to Beowulf clusters in the presentation and paper. Additional information on the HPCchallenge Benchmarks can be found at http://icl. cs.utk.edu/hpcc/
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA433090
Entities
People
- David Koester
- Jack Dongarra
- Piotr Luszczek
Organizations
- MITRE Corporation