SPEC releases CPU2006 benchmark

After releasing SPECviewperf 9 on tuesday, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation releases their CPU2006 benchmark:

“CPU2006 is SPEC’s next-generation, industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system’s processor, memory subsystem and compiler. SPEC designed CPU2006 to provide a comparative measure of compute-intensive performance across the widest practical range of hardware using workloads developed from real user applications. These benchmarks are provided as source code and require the user to be comfortable using compiler commands as well as other commands via a command interpreter using a console or command prompt window in order to generate executable binaries.”

Although SPECviewperf 9 is free to download, CPU2006 isn’t; a retail version costs 800 USD, an upgrade 400 USD and a license for Educational/non-profit organization is 200 USD. It can be purchased through their online-ordering system.

Tech Tags: Performance testing benchmark

A Critique of RDMA

Patrick Geoffray from Myricom, the creators of Myrinet, posted a nice rant about RDMA and why it fails to scale well with MPI and direct socket-communication. He basically says that every time you need to register or synchronize memory in MPI, RDMA looses all it’s advantages since the CPU is heavily involved: Those operations are expensive and you add latency to the operation.

Read his fantastic rant – backed by statistics – at HPC-Wire.

Tech Tags: hpc benchmark rdma mpi

LRZ’s Altix breaks STREAM Triad record

Via Heise:

LRZ’s Altix 4700 broke the STREAM Triad Test record with a 1024 CPU/4TB Linux Single-System-Image.
SGI scored the record using the OpenMP (shared memory) version of the test.

SGI’s press-release

Tags:
lrz, altix, sgi, hpc, supercomputer, stream benchmark, openmp