[Beowulf] HPCG benchmark, again

[John Hearns]

Jörg,   I would have a look at the Archer/UK-HPC benchmarks
https://github.com/hpc-uk/archer-benchmarks
They have Castep and CP2K in the applications benchmarks which will be
relevant to you.
Also thankyou for looking for advice here!

As someone who has worked for several cluster vendors, please can I make
these heartfelt plese to anyone who is doing a procurement exercise:


   - choose relevant benchmarks - as Jorg is doing here. Do not load a lot
   of benchmarks into your RFP just because they sound cute
   - application benchmarks are great - but remember they take time to set
   up and run properly. Again choose a set which are relevant to your use and
   have some mercy on the poor overworked engineers
   - If the benchmark requires a license for commercial use be prepared to
   help the vendors get the relevant license (Guassian I believe)
   - be realistic about the scale you want the benchmarks run on. Vendors
   like my company can get time on Top500 class clusters to run benchmarks.
   Also you can book time on large clusters provided by CPU vendors. But be
   realistic - are you procuring a huge system where your users really will be
   scaling to those numbers of cores? If so yes go ahead and ask for it. But
   if you are procuring one rack of servers...



On Fri, 18 Mar 2022 at 23:08, Jörg Saßmannshausen <
sassy-work at sassy.formativ.net> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> further the emails back in 2020 around the HPCG benchmark test, as we are
> in
> the process of getting a new cluster I was wondering if somebody else in
> the
> meantime has used that test to benchmark the particular performance of the
> cluster.
> From what I can see, the latest HPCG version is 3.1 from August 2019. I
> also
> have noticed that their website has a link to download a version which
> includes the latest A100 GPUs from nVidia.
> https://www.hpcg-benchmark.org/software/view.html?id=280
>
> What I was wondering is: has anybody else apart from Prentice tried that
> test
> and is it somehow useful, or does it just give you another set of numbers?
>
> Our new cluster will not be at the same league as the supercomputers, but
> we
> would like to have at least some kind of handle so we can compare the
> various
> offers from vendors. My hunch is the benchmark will somehow (strongly?)
> depend
> on how it is tuned. As my former colleague used to say: I am looking for
> some
> war stories (not very apt to say these days!).
>
> Either way, I hope you are all well given the strange new world we are
> living
> in right now.
>
> All the best from a spring like dark London
>
> Jörg
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
> https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20220320/bc77949f/attachment.htm>