In October 2021, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released the new (application-based) SPEChpc 2021 benchmark suites. They target at heterogeneous multi-node systems with several levels of parallelism, as found in today’s and future CPU or GPU clusters. These levels of parallelism are addressed by “MPI+X” where “X” can be one of the following node-level programming paradigms: OpenMP on the host, OpenACC, OpenMP target offloading. To evaluate HPC systems of different sizes, SPEChpc 2021 offers four suites that provide datasets from “tiny” to “large”.
Non-commercial qualified organizations can download and use SPEChpc2021 Benchmark Suites free of charge.
The official press release can be found on the SPEC website. Additionally, HPCwire and nextPlatform provide articles about the release of SPEChpc 2021.
About RWTH Aachen University as SPEC member:
RWTH Aachen University is a member of SPEC since 2013. In the context of the High Performance Group (HPG), employees of the IT Center’s HPC group have actively engaged in the release of the SPEChpc 2021 Benchmark Suites. They have also performed corresponding performance measurements on the CLAIX HPC system which are published on the SPEC website. At RWTH Aachen University, the SPEC benchmarks are used, e.g., for the procurement of big HPC systems, as well as in research and development of software.
About SPEC:
SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises more than 120 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide.