The NAS Parallel Benchmarks

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) are a suite of parallel computer performance benchmarks. They were originally developed at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1991 to assess high-end parallel supercomputers. Although they are no longer used as widely as they once were for comparing high-end system performance, they continue to be studied and analyzed a great deal in the high-performance computing community. The acronym 'NAS' originally stood for the Numerical Aeronautical Simulation Program at NASA Ames. The name of this organization was subsequently changed to the Numerical Aerospace Simulation Program, and more recently to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Center, although the acronym remains 'NAS.' The developers of the original NPB suite were David H. Bailey, Eric Barszcz, John Barton, David Browning, Russell Carter, LeoDagum, Rod Fatoohi, Samuel Fineberg, Paul Frederickson, Thomas Lasinski, Rob Schreiber, Horst Simon, V. Venkatakrishnan and Sisira Weeratunga. The original NAS Parallel Benchmarks consisted of eight individual benchmark problems, each of which focused on some aspect of scientific computing. The principal focus was in computational aerophysics, although most of these benchmarks have much broader relevance, since in a much larger sense they are typical of many real-world scientific computing applications. The NPB suite grew out of the need for a more rational procedure to select new supercomputers for acquisition by NASA. The emergence of commercially available highly parallel computer systems in the late 1980s offered an attractive alternative to parallel vector supercomputers that had been the mainstay of high-end scientific computing. However, the introduction of highly parallel systems was accompanied by a regrettable level of hype, not only on the part of the commercial vendors but even, in some cases, by scientists using the systems. As a result, it was difficult to discern whether the new systems offered any fundamental performance advantage over vector supercomputers, and, if so, which of the parallel offerings would be most useful in real-world scientific computation. In part to draw attention to some of the performance reporting abuses prevalent at the time, the present author wrote a humorous essay 'Twelve Ways to Fool the Masses,' which described in a light-hearted way a number of the questionable ways in which both vendor marketing people and scientists were inflating and distorting their performance results. All of this underscored the need for an objective and scientifically defensible measure to compare performance on these systems