Application Performance of Physical System Simulations

Various parallel computer benchmarking projects have been around since early 1990s but the adopted so far approaches for performance analysis require a significant revision in view of the recent developments of both the application domain and the computer technologies. This paper presents a novel performance evaluation methodology based on assessing the processing rate of two orthogonal use cases – dense and sparse physical systems – as well as the energy efficiency for both. Evaluation results with two popular codes — HPL and HPCG — validate our approach and demonstrate its use for analysis and interpretation in order to identify and confirm current technological challenges as well as to track and roadmap the future application performance of physical system simulations