[Beowulf] MPI application benchmarks

[Robert G. Brown]

On Sun, 6 May 2007, Toon Moene wrote:

> Martin Siegert wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> this is partially triggered by the mentioniong of the SPEC MPI2007
>> benchmark: what are people using as a benchmark suite for RFP purposes?
>
> Our own code.
>
> Anyone who does something different for serious RFP purposes is playing with 
> their lives (at least in our surroundings - civil servants are heavily 
> watched as far as fraud / or attempted fraud in these case go).

Wow do YOU have enlightened guardians of the public trust.  Here, one is
lucky if one's grant or corporate review officers understand anything
but "Megaflops".  Oops, that shows my age.  I meant "Gigaflops" or maybe
even "Teraflops".  If you ask them what a "Flop" is, sometimes they
might even be able to answer!

One dimension is all that these folks can usually handle, at least
without an extensive education process.  Computer science grant review
and in SOME cases general scientific grant review excepted, of course --
in some branches of physics there are actually folks that have heard of
clusters at this point who know better.  But there are also a whole lot
of people stuck back there at "Flops", or "MIPs" for whom aggregate
capacity in one simple measure is understandable, and for whom the
nonlinear task scaling of a cluster will forever be a closed book.

     rgb

>
>

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu