Introduction to the HPCChallenge Benchmark Suite

Abstract

Abstract : The HPCChallenge suite of benchmarks will examine the performance of HPC architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used in the Top5OO list. The HPCChallenge suite is being designed to augment the Top5OO list, provide benchmarks that bound the performance of many real applications as a function of memory access characteristics, e.g., spatial and temporal locality, and provide a framework for including additional benchmarks. The HPCChallenge benchmarks are scalable with the size of data sets being a function of the largest HPL matrix for a system. The HPCChallenge benchmark suite has been released by the DARPA HPCS program to help define the performance boundaries of future Petascale computing systems. The suite is composed of several well known computational kernels (STREAM, High Performance Linpack, matrix multiply - DGEMM, matrix transpose, FFT, RandomAccess, and bandwidth/latency tests) that attempt to span high and low spatial and temporal locality space.