Toward a New Metric for Ranking High Performance Computing Systems
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States), Michael Heroux, USDOE Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Administration, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States), Jack J. Dongarra · 2013
The High Performance Linpack (HPL), or Top 500, benchmark [1] is the most widely recognized and discussed metric for ranking high performance computing systems. However, HPL is increasingly unreliable as a true measure of system performance for a growing collection of important science and engineering applications. In this paper we describe a new high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) benchmark. HPCG is composed of computations and data access patterns more commonly found in applications. Using HPCG we strive for a better correlation to real scientific application performance and expect to drive computer system design and implementation in directions that will better impact performance improvement.