Introduction to the HPCChallenge Benchmark Suite

Introduction to the HPCChallenge Benchmark Suite
† ‡Jack J. Dongarra Piotr Luszczek
December 13, 2004
Abstract trial user community. HPCS program researchers have
initiated a fundamental reassessment of how we define
The HPCChallenge suite of benchmarks will examine and measure performance, programmability, portabil
the performance of HPC architectures using kernels ity, robustness and ultimately, productivity in the HPC
with memory access patterns more challenging than domain.
those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) bench The HPCS program seeks to create trans Petaflop
mark used in the Top500 list. The HPCChallenge suite systems of significant value to the Government HPC
is being designed to augment the Top500 list, provide community. Such value will be determined by assess
benchmarks that bound the performance of many real ing many additional factors beyond just theoretical peak
applications as a function of memory access character flops (floating point operations). Ultimately, the goal is
istics e.g., spatial and temporal locality, and provide a to decrease the time to solution, which means decreas
framework for including additional benchmarks. The ing both the execution time and development time of an
HPCChallenge benchmarks are scalable with the size of application on a particular system. Evaluating the capa
data sets being a function of the largest HPL matrix for a bilities of a system with respect to these goals requires a
system. The HPCChallenge benchmark ...