Using the New SPEChpc 2021 Scientific Application Benchmark Suites for the Evaluation of HPC Ecosystems

The High Performance Group (HPG) of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) develops industry standard benchmark for HPC systems. The group has a track record of producing high-quality benchmarks serving both academia and industry use. In addition to the widely-used SPEC ACCEL, SPEC OMP2012 and SPEC MPI2007 benchmarks, a new benchmark named SPEChpc 2021 was recently released to evaluate all dimensions of parallelism in modern HPC architectures, i.e., MPI+X. SPEC HPG offers them free of charge to non-commercial users.

In this tutorial, participants will learn how to leverage the new SPEChpc 2021 benchmark suites for the evaluation of HPC ecosystems. This includes the usage for software stack evaluation, testing and tuning of systems, comparison of systems (e.g., for decision-making in procurement), and other common use cases. We will provide demos and hands-on guidance on how to install, configure, and run these new benchmark suites on HPC systems provided. We will further show how the results will be interpreted, discuss use cases, and present the publication process of results. Practically, the knowledge gained in this tutorial is applicable to all other SPEC HPG benchmarks as they share the same toolset and similar benchmark philosophy with SPEChpc 2021.

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Contributors:

• Holger Brunst (Technische Universität Dresden, ZIH)
• Robert Henschel (Indiana University)
• Sandra Wienke (RWTH Aachen University)
• Nick Hagerty (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
• Junjie Li (Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin)
• Verónica Melesse Vergara (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)