Principles for Automated and Reproducible Benchmarking
Tuomas Koskela, Ilektra A. Christidi, Mosé Giordano, Emily Dubrovska, James Quinn, Christopher M. Maynard, Dave Case, Kaan Olgu, Tom Deakin · 2023
The diversity in processor technology used by High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities is growing, and so applications must be written in such a way that they can attain high levels of performance across a range of different CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Measuring application performance across this wide range of platforms becomes crucial, but there are significant challenges to do this rigorously, in a time efficient way, whilst assuring results are scientifically meaningful, reproducible, and actionable. This paper presents a methodology for measuring and analysing the performance portability of a parallel application and shares a software framework which combines and extends adopted technologies to provide a usable benchmarking tool. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the methodology and benchmarking framework by showcasing a variety of benchmarking case studies which utilise a stable of supercomputing resources at a national scale.