CTWatch
November 2006 A
High Productivity Computing Systems and the Path Towards Usable Petascale Computing
Piotr Luszczek, University of Tennessee
Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Jeremy Kepner, MIT Lincoln Lab

1
Introduction

The HPCC benchmark suite was initially developed for the DARPA's HPCS program 1 to provide a set of standardized hardware probes based on commonly occurring computational software kernels. The HPCS program has initiated a fundamental reassessment of how we define and measure performance, programmability, portability, robustness and, ultimately, productivity in the high-end domain. Consequently, the suite was aimed to both provide conceptual expression of the underlying computation as well as be applicable to a broad spectrum of computational science fields. Clearly, a number of compromises must have lead to the current form of the suite given such a broad scope of design requirements. HPCC was designed to approximately bound computations of high and low spatial and temporal locality (see Figure 1 which gives the conceptual design space for the HPCC component tests). In addition, because the HPCC tests consist of simple mathematical operations, this provides a unique opportunity to look at language and parallel programming model issues. As such, the benchmark is to serve both the system user and designer communities 2.

Finally, Figure 2 shows a generic memory subsystem and how each level of the hierarchy is tested by the HPCC software and what are the design goals of the future HPCS system - these are the projected target performance numbers that are to come out of the wining HPCS vendor designs.

Figure 1

Figure 1. The application areas targeted by the HPCS Program are bound by the HPCC tests in the memory access locality space.
Figure 2

Figure 2. HPCS program benchmarks and performance targets.

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Reference this article
Lusczek, P., Dongarra, J., Kepner, J. "Design and Implementation of the HPC Challenge Benchmark Suite ," CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 4A, November 2006 A. http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2006/11/design-and-implementation-of-the-hpc-challenge-benchmark-suite/

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