HPC Challenge Benchmark
Encyclopedia
The HPC Challenge Benchmark is a set of benchmark
s targeting to test multiple attributes that can contribute substantially to the real-world performance of HPC systems, co-sponsored by the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems
program, the United States Department of Energy
and the National Science Foundation
.
It consists at this time of 7 benchmarks: HPL, STREAM, RandomAccess
, PTRANS, FFTE, DGEMM
and b_eff Latency/Bandwidth. HPL is the LINPACK
TPP (Toward Peak Performance) benchmark. The test stresses the floating point performance of a system. STREAM is a benchmark that measures sustainable memory bandwidth
. RandomAccess measures the rate of random updates
of memory. PTRANS measures the rate of transfer for larges arrays of data from multiprocessor's memory. Latency/Bandwidth measures latency and bandwidth of communication patterns of increasing complexity between as many nodes as is time-wise feasible.
The annual HPC Challenge Award Competition at the Supercomputing Conference
focuses on four of the most challenging benchmarks in the suite:
There are two classes of awards:
Benchmark (computing)
In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it...
s targeting to test multiple attributes that can contribute substantially to the real-world performance of HPC systems, co-sponsored by the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems
High Productivity Computing Systems
High Productivity Computing Systems is a DARPA project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2002-2010 timeframe....
program, the United States Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material...
and the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
.
It consists at this time of 7 benchmarks: HPL, STREAM, RandomAccess
Giga-updates per second
Giga-updates per second is a measure of computer performance. GUPS is a measurement of how frequently a computer can issue updates to randomly generated RAM locations. GUPS measurements stress the latency and especially bandwidth capabilities of a machine.-External links:* , an HPC Challenge...
, PTRANS, FFTE, DGEMM
General Matrix Multiply
The General Matrix Multiply is a subroutine in the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms which performs matrix multiplication, that is the multiplication of two matrices...
and b_eff Latency/Bandwidth. HPL is the LINPACK
LINPACK
LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...
TPP (Toward Peak Performance) benchmark. The test stresses the floating point performance of a system. STREAM is a benchmark that measures sustainable memory bandwidth
Memory bandwidth
Memory bandwidth is the rate at which data can be read from or stored into a semiconductor memory by a processor. Memory bandwidth is usually expressed in units of bytes/second, though this can vary for systems with natural data sizes that are not a multiple of the commonly used 8-bit bytes.Memory...
. RandomAccess measures the rate of random updates
Giga-updates per second
Giga-updates per second is a measure of computer performance. GUPS is a measurement of how frequently a computer can issue updates to randomly generated RAM locations. GUPS measurements stress the latency and especially bandwidth capabilities of a machine.-External links:* , an HPC Challenge...
of memory. PTRANS measures the rate of transfer for larges arrays of data from multiprocessor's memory. Latency/Bandwidth measures latency and bandwidth of communication patterns of increasing complexity between as many nodes as is time-wise feasible.
The annual HPC Challenge Award Competition at the Supercomputing Conference
Supercomputing Conference
SC , the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is the name of the annual conference established in 1988 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society...
focuses on four of the most challenging benchmarks in the suite:
- Global HPL
- Global RandomAccessGiga-updates per secondGiga-updates per second is a measure of computer performance. GUPS is a measurement of how frequently a computer can issue updates to randomly generated RAM locations. GUPS measurements stress the latency and especially bandwidth capabilities of a machine.-External links:* , an HPC Challenge...
- EP STREAM (Triad) per system
- Global FFT
There are two classes of awards:
- Class 1: Best performance on a base or optimized run submitted to the HPC Challenge website.
- Class 2: Most "elegant" implementation of four or more of the HPC Challenge benchmarks.