ESP: A System Utilization Benchmark
Adrian T. Wong, Leonid Oliker, William Kramer, Teresa L. Kaltz, David H. Bailey · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 2000
This article describes a new benchmark, called the Effective System Performance (ESP) test, which is designed to measure system-level performance, including such factors as job scheduling efficiency, handling of large jobs and shutdown-reboot times. In particular, this test can be used to study the effects of various scheduling policies and parameters. We present here some results that we have obtained so far on the Cray T3E and IBM SP systems, together with insights obtained from simulations. 1. Introduction The overall performance value of a high performance computing system depends not only on its raw computational speed but also on system management effectiveness, including job scheduling efficiency, reboot and recovery times and the level of process management. Common performance metrics such as the LINPACK and NAS Parallel Benchmarks [3, 1] are useful for measuring sustained computational performance for individual jobs, but give little or no insight into system-level efficienc...