HPCC Handout

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite is designed to establish, through rigorous testing and measurement, the bounds of performance on many real-world applications for computational science at extreme scale. To this end, the benchmark includes a suite of tests for sustained floating point operations, memory bandwidth, rate of random memory updates, interconnect latency, and interconnect bandwidth. The main factors that differentiate the various components of the suite are the memory access patterns that, in a meaningful way, span the space of memory access characteristics, which is spanned by temporal and spatial locality. The components of the suite are brought together inside HPCC, which allows information to pass between the components and provide a comprehensive testing and measurement framework that goes beyond the sum of its parts.

Each year, the HPCC Awards competition features contestants who submit performance numbers from the world’s largest supercomputer installations, as well as alternative implementations that use a vast array of parallel programming environments. The results from the competition are announced at the annual gathering of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, and are available to the public to help track the progress of both the high-end computing arena and the commodity hardware segment.