High Performance Computing

Chapter 4

Benchmarking

Abstract

Benchmarking is a way to measure the performance of a supercomputer empirically. A benchmark provides some standardized type of workload that may vary in size or input dataset. Benchmarks provide as an output a metric that can be used for comparing the performance of different supercomputers based on that benchmark's specific workload. These performance metrics include floating-point operations per second, traversed edges per second, and giga updates per second. Because a supercomputer's performance can be compared and ranked based entirely on a single benchmark, multiple differing supercomputing performance rankings exist. A supercomputer that performs well using one specific benchmark may not perform very well when ...