Pragmatic Benchmarking for Research Computing
Dennis Milechin, Ahmed Aly, Josh Bevan, Charlie Jahnke, Yun Cheng Shen, Brian Gregor · 2021
The Research Computing Services (RCS) group at Boston University (BU), developed a benchmark suite to evaluate the performance of newer hardware under consideration for purchase for the BU Shared Computing Cluster (SCC). The custom suite of benchmarks is used to generate performance metrics that are representative of the highly diverse types of jobs run on the cluster. The results of the benchmarks are used to make informed decisions about hardware upgrades in order to provide the best balance of performance and value for cluster users. In this paper we discuss the present reasons for creating a custom benchmark suite, the general architecture of the suite, and provide sample results from selected benchmarks that we ran on our cluster.