Introduction to the HPC Challenge Benchmark Suite

The HPC Challenge benchmark suite has been released by the DARPA HPCS program to help define the performance boundaries of future Petascale computing systems. HPC Challenge is a suite of tests that examine the performance of HPC architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used in the Top500 list. Thus, the suite is designed to augment the Top500 list, providing benchmarks that bound the performance of many real applications as a function of memory access characteristics e.g., spatial and temporal locality, and providing a framework for including additional tests. In particular, the suite is composed of several well known computational kernels (STREAM, HPL, matrix multiply--DGEMM, parallel matrix transpose--PTRANS, FFT, RandomAccess, and bandwidth/latency tests--b{sub eff}) that attempt to span high and low spatial and temporal locality space. By design, the HPC Challenge tests are scalable with the size of data sets being a function of the largest HPL matrix for the tested system