On 03 Jul 2014, at 09:48, John Hearns <hear...@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 03/07/2014, Joseph Landman <land...@scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Now just get all those writing rfps to stop with the madness.  The number
>> and it's pursuit are one of the more significant causes of entropy (as in
>> waste heat generation ) as I have ever seen.  A dubious metric at best with
>> extremely limited, if any, correlation to end user realizable performance.
> 
> 
> Absolutely agree. Application level benchmarks for the codes the
> system is going to run.
> And also put that in as a simple acceptance test - does the cluster
> run code X on N processors in the time T you said it would? Wham bam
> thankyou.
> 
In practice using full application benchmarks may be challenging: When buying 
cutting-edge gear, the vendors usually have rely on extrapolating the 
performance 
of the application for future hardware. 

The more compilcated the application, the more work it is to extrapolate and 
there is more uncertainity. This in turn will (at least in the current economic 
climate) 
put most vendors in “risk minimization” mode: They avoid overcommitment and
have very conservative bids or even fall back to offering “safe" 
current-generation
hardware *yawn*.  

Thus, capturing a minimal set of relevant critical performance metrics in 
synthetic
benchmarks and simple kernels would be ideal. The downside is that this may not
always be a simple task either.

> 
> What are the audiences thoughts on the HPCC benchmarks?
> 

They provide a nice toolkit for the kind of evaluation I mentioned above. For 
some things
(like I/O) complementary benchmarks should be used though. 

Having a single number benchmark like HPL is nice for evaluating trends though 
and
I’m pretty sure also that the need for having a some sort of top ranking will 
not 
go away soon. There are a couple of interesting efforts to do this in a more 
balanced way
that reflects more the “average" application performance:
- HPGMG (https://hpgmg.org/)
- HPCG (https://software.sandia.gov/hpcg/) 

Here are some interesting new results of how HPCG ranking changes the top system
ranking in HPL: 
https://twitter.com/a_z_e_t/status/482062498477383680/photo/1

O-P
-- 
Olli-Pekka Lehto
Development Manager, Computing Platforms 
CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd.
E-Mail: olli-pekka.le...@csc.fi // Tel: +358 50 381 8604 // skype: oplehto // 
twitter: @ople


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