HPC Challenge Benchmark

The HPC Challenge Benchmark is a set of benchmarks 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^[1].

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^[2].

The annual HPC Challenge Award Competition at the Supercomputing Conference focuses on four of the most challenging benchmarks in the suite:

• Global HPL
• Global RandomAccess
• 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^[3].

See also

• Locality of reference

References

1. ^ "Cray X1 Supercomputer Has Highest Reported Scores on Government-Sponsored HPC Challenge Benchmark Tests". 2004-06-14. http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=581048&. Retrieved 2010-01-22. 
2. ^ "HPCC FAQ". University of Tennessee. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/faq/index.html#89. Retrieved 2010-01-22. 
3. ^ "HPC Challenge Award Competition". DARPA HPCS Program. http://www.hpcchallenge.org/. Retrieved 2010-01-23. 

External links

• HPC Challenge Benchmark Official Website
• HPC Challenge Award Competition Official Website