HPCwire: HPC@Intel: Go Beyond the Kernel

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March 05, 2009

HPC@Intel: Go Beyond the Kernel

by Lance Shuler and Tyler Thessin, Intel Software and Services Group

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Refocusing HPC Benchmarking on Total Application Performance

Want to improve application performance by 10x or 100x? Few HPC customers would say no. Yet in some cases, the promises of tremendous performance improvements from accelerators, attached processors, field-programmable gate arrays, and the like evaporate when total application performance is evaluated. Benchmarks that focus on kernel performance can provide important information, but only total application benchmarking can give customers a true picture of how an HPC system will function back in their data center.

Why benchmark?

Benchmarking is an essential means for helping end users choose and configure HPC systems. An end user has a problem and needs to know the best way to solve it. More specifically, the end user has a specific workload to run and needs to find hardware that can deliver the best performance, reliability, application portability, and ease of application maintenance. As Purdue University researchers wrote in a recent IEEE article that argued for real application benchmarking, an HPC benchmark should, among other things, produce metrics that help customers evaluate the overall solution time for their problems.

The claim of a 10x to 100x improvement from a particular product can easily grab someone's attention. But what does that 10x measurement really mean? In many cases, these claims are derived from kernel benchmarking, which might fail to tell the whole story. While an increase in floating-point performance or the addition of a CPU accelerator could deliver a significant improvement for one kernel, the total application improvement depends on additional HPC system elements. As one participant argued in a recent HPC conference covered by IDC, solution time can be represented as an equation:

Solution time = processing time + memory time + communication time + I/O time

Kernel benchmarking has its place, but benchmarking total (or "real") application performance is critical for accurately evaluating HPC systems.

The value of kernel benchmarking

Kernel benchmarking is unlikely to disappear any time soon. For one thing, it is often easier to create and run a benchmark that focuses on a small part of an application than one that measures performance across the entire application. In addition, a kernel benchmark is frequently more portable across systems. Since a key goal of benchmarking is to compare application performance on more than one system or system configuration, having a portable benchmarking test is extremely important.

Kernel benchmarking can also produce valuable information. If a developer has identified application subroutines that are essential for a certain workload, kernel benchmarking can offer a good means of quickly and easily measuring performance for those subroutines.

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