As part of a new global program aimed at sparking increased use of SPEC/HPG benchmarks for high-performance computing (HPC) research, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is offering its High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) benchmarks free of charge to qualified non-profit organizations.
The program introduces non-commercial (free) licenses for three SPEC/HPG benchmarks:
- The SPEC MPI benchmark suite for measuring performance of compute-intensive applications using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware.
- The SPEC OMP benchmark suite for measuring performance and energy efficiency using applications based on the OpenMP standard for shared-memory parallel processing.
- The SPEC ACCEL benchmark suite for measuring hardware-accelerated performance for highly parallel compute-intensive applications using the OpenCL, OpenACC and OpenMP standards.
University professors or full-time staff may submit requests (link), and software is licensed to the organization rather than an individual.
SPEC’s terms state: “A non-commercial license is available free of charge for use by organizations that are not required to have a commercial license. The free non-commercial license cannot be used by any commercial enterprise (excepting SPEC/HPG members) that engages in marketing, developing, testing, consulting for and/or selling computers, computer services, accelerator devices, drivers, software or other high performance computing systems or components in the computer marketplace.”
The licensing changes are aimed at supporting the research community and facilitating a healthy SPEC ecosystem and membership body. As part of its plan to step up community engagement, the SPEC/HPG committee also plans to offer tutorials and online training.
“We expect to receive a lot of important input that will help us continually improve current benchmarks and develop new performance evaluation tools to meet future needs,” said Robert Henschel, SPEC/HPG chair, in a statement. “We also expect increased SPEC/HPG membership as a result of more organizations recognizing the value of our benchmarks and wanting to have greater involvement in the development process and early access to emerging benchmarks.”
“This is a very exciting development that will be welcomed by the HPC research and academic communities worldwide,” said Torsten Hoefler, who leads the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory (SPCL) at ETH Zurich and co-chairs the MPI Forum’s collective operations working group. “SPEC/HPG benchmarks provide a framework that helps to ensure the rigor, reproducibility and application-based versatility that are critical to sound research efforts.”
Founded in 1988, SPEC is a non-profit organization that “establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy consumption for the newest generation of computing systems.” Its benchmarks are widely used to evaluate the performance of computer systems. Current SPEC/HPG members include AMD, HPE, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Nvidia and Oracle. SPEC/HPG Associates include Argonne National Laboratory; Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf; Indiana University; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; RWTH Aachen University; Technische Universitat Dresden, ZIH; and University of Delaware.
More info: https://www.spec.org/hpg/