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July 14, 2006
Uses and Misuses of Linpack: A Q&A with Doug Miles
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With each release of the Top500 list, more attention is directed at the relevancy of the ranking and the associated Linpack benchmark. As the HPC community expands, many vendors and users are openly questioning the significance of Linpack as a useful metric for determining supercomputer performance. In a recent HPCwire article, Stephen Wheat, Senior Director of Intel's High Performance Computing Platform Office, offered some of his ideas on this topic.
Recently, we got the opportunity to ask Doug Miles about his thoughts on the Top500. As the director of Advanced Compilers and Tools at STMicroelectronics, Doug has primary responsibility for managing The Portland Group Compiler Technology business unit. He has been involved in high performance technical computing since 1985 and has a unique perspective on the application side of HPC.
In this Q&A, Doug discusses the significance of the Linpack benchmark and what it actually measures in today's HPC systems.
HPCwire: Do you think the Top500 is useful for companies looking to evaluate the performance of HPC systems?
Miles: In the 1980s, the Linpack 100 benchmark was used to measure achievable compiled performance on supercomputers. Shared-memory parallel systems could auto-parallelize Linpack 100. Performance on this benchmark was widely regarded as a way to rank the world's fastest available vector-based or microprocessor-based computer systems.
In the late 80's and early 90's, it became popular to market so-called massively parallel systems based on theoretical peak performance. These theoretical peaks far exceeded achievable compiled performance. These massively parallel systems could not run Linpack 100, or any other benchmark that required automatic optimization by a compiler. However, continued efforts by vendors, and especially by the HPC user community, proved that MPPs could be used effectively as supercomputers. A revised benchmark was needed.
In 1993, a scalable version of Linpack called HPL was developed to measure the fastest computers in the world. It allowed comparisons of achievable compiled/library performance on all types of supercomputers, and quickly replaced Linpack 100 as the most widely quoted HPC benchmark.
While it is not ideal, the HPL benchmark is still useful in that it provides a real measure of achievable performance on an algorithm fundamental to HPC using a benchmark that is quick and easy to run and verify on any of the currently viable supercomputing platforms.
HPCwire: Does the Top500 still serve a useful purpose in measuring the performance capability of HPC systems?
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