On 5/4/07, Martin Siegert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We will be purchasing a shared cluster for a wide community (currently more than 1000 users). Thus, the common response on this list to evaluate hardware - "use your own application as benchmark" - does not work: users change, users' applications change, etc., etc. Thus, I need a benchmark suite that tests a wide spectrum of properties.
My answer is still to "use your own application(s)." Poll your users and find out what they have and what they are going to run. Find some who already have codes that scale well (>1000 cores) and ask them to participate. Many vendors will allow you to run your own codes on systems they have at their own sites before you decide to purchase. These vendor-hosted systems are typically only 256 cores or less, but it gives you some idea as to how your codes might run. I also suggest picking some representative synthetic benchmarks to test floating point and integer operations, memory bandwidth, MPI ping-pongs (the SPEC MPI2007, among others, would fit here), the HPC Challenge codes, and the like. Many sites will then take all of these results (synthetic + their own applications) and aggregate the results, possibly with weighting factors, into a single number. If you do this over a number of years and number of systems, with the same benchmarks, you can even start to normalize against a "base" system and take things like different core counts and costs into account. -- Brian D. Ropers-Huilman, Director Systems Administration and Technical Operations Supercomputing Institute <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 599 Walter Library +1 612-626-5948 (V) 117 Pleasant Street S.E. +1 612-624-8861 (F) University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus Minneapolis, MN 55455-0255 http://www.msi.umn.edu/ _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
