Cluster benchmark(s)?

[James Cownie]

Martin Siegert <siegert at sfu.ca> wrote :-

> Here is the idea: There should be benchmarks and speedup data for different
> type of cluster applications:
> 1. Embarrassingly parallel (e.g., Monte-Carlo simulations).
>    In this case the benchmark will be dominated by the CPUs, the
>    interconnect is unimportant, the speedup curve will show linear
>    scaling for (almost) unlimited number of processors.
> 2. Applications with "nearest neighbour" communications
>    (e.g., finite-difference methods for PDEs). In this case there is
>    significant communication between processors, however, since the
>    communication is local (i.e., processor n only talks with n+1 and
>    n-1) the scaling of the communication time with the # of processors
>    is not so bad (constant + probably a small linear piece).
>    In this case you should see a maximum in the speedup curve the location
>    of which depends on you interconnect.
> 3. Applications with pairwise (all-to-all) communications
>    (e.g., parallel FFT). In this case the time for communication scales
>    proportional to the square of the # of processors. The benchmark will
>    be dominated by the speed of the interconnect, i.e., the speedup curve
>    will show minimal speedups (or even speedups < 1) for fast ethernet.

Umm, doesn't that describe the NAS parallel benchmarks ?
IIRC they include most of those categories, and have the advantages
that 

1) They already exist (you can download the sources)
2) There are already numbers for them on many machines

-- Jim 

James Cownie	<jcownie at etnus.com>
Etnus, LLC.     +44 117 9071438
http://www.etnus.com