Greg Gaertner

SPEComp: A New Benchmark Suite for Measuring Parallel Computer Performance

We present a new benchmark suite for parallel computers. SPEComp targets mid-size parallel servers. It includes a number of science/engineering and data processing applications. Parallelism is expressed in the OpenMP API. The suite includes two data sets, Medium and Large, of approximately 1.6 and 4 GB in size. Our overview also describes the organization developing SPEComp, issues in creating OpenMP parallel benchmarks, the benchmarking methodology underlying SPEComp, and basic performance characteristics.

Parallel programming with message passing and directives

The authors discuss methods for expressing and tuning the performance of parallel programs, using two programming models in the same program: distributed and shared memory. Such methods are important for anyone who uses these large machines for parallel programs as well as for those who study combinations of the two programming models. The article outlines applications in hydrology, computational chemistry, general science, seismic processing, aeronautics, and computational physics. Emphasizing both I/O and computation, they apply several numerical methods including finite element analysis, wave equation integration, linear algebra subroutines, fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), filters, and a variety of PDEs (partial differential equations) and ODEs (ordinary differential equations).

SPEC HPG benchmarks for high-performance systems

In this paper, we discuss the results and characteristics of the benchmark suites maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporations (SPEC) High-Performance Group (HPG). Currently, SPECHPGhas two lines of benchmark suites for measuring performance of large-scale systems SPEC OMP and SPEC HPC2002. SPEC OMP uses the OpenMP API and includes benchmark suites intended for measuring performance of modern shared memory parallel systems. SPEC HPC2002 uses both OpenMP and MPI, and thus it is suitable for distributed memory systems, shared memory systems and hybrid systems. SPEC HPC2002 contains benchmarks from three popular application areas: chemistry, seismic and weather forecasting. Each of the three benchmarks in HPC2002 has a small and a medium data set in order to satisfy the need for benchmarking a wide range of high-performance systems. We analyse published results of these benchmark suites regarding scalability. We also present current efforts of SPEC HPG to create new releases of the benchmark suites.

SPEC HPG Benchmarks for Large Systems

Performance characteristics of application programs onlarge-scale systems are often significantly different from those on smaller systems. In this paper, we discuss such characteristics of the benchmark suites maintained by SPEC’s High-Performance Group (HPG). The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s (SPEC) High-Performance Group (HPG) has developed a set of benchmarks for measuring performance of large-scale systems using both OpenMP and MPI parallel programming paradigms. Currently, SPEC HPG has two lines of benchmark suites: SPEC OMP and SPEC HPC2002. SPEC OMP uses the OpenMP API and includes benchmark suites intended for measuring performance of modern shared memory parallel systems. SPEC HPC2002 is based on both OpenMP and MPI, and thus it is suitable for distributed memory systems, shared memory systems, and hybrid systems. SPEC HPC2002 contains benchmarks from three popular application areas, Chemistry, Seismic, and Weather Forecasting. Each of the three benchmarks in HPC2002 has small and medium data sets in order to satisfy the need for benchmarking a wide range of high-performance systems. We present our experiences regarding the scalability of the benchmark suites. We also analyze published results of these benchmark suites based on application program behavior and systems’ architectural features.

SPEC HPC2002: The Next High-Performance Computer Benchmark

The High-Performance Group of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC/HPG) [1] is developing a next release of its high-performance computer benchmark suite. The current suite, SPEChpc96 [2] is expected to be replaced by the SPEC HPC2002 suite in the second quarter of the year 2002. HPC2002 represents a minor update to SPECs current high-performance computing benchmarks. In the last subsection of this document we describe SPECs longer-term plans.