The HPC Challenge Awards demonstrate that, in addition to achieving successive top-place rankings on the June and November 2011 editions of the TOP500 list measuring LINPACK computational speed, the K computer is evaluated very highly in all-around performance as a general-purpose supercomputer. The K computer is currently under joint development by RIKEN and Fujitsu.

Read more...

 

The Jaguar and Kraken supercomputers housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility and the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences continued to demonstrate their balanced architectures this week, taking half the top spots in this year's High-Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge.

The challenge gives the world's most powerful systems an opportunity to demonstrate the range of hardware and software capabilities necessary for a useful supercomputer.

Read more...

 The HPC Challenge Awards are designed to evaluate four key measures that represent frequently used numerical operation patterns in scientific computing. Among them, the Global FFT is widely utilized in important scientific applications, such as climate modeling, which is critical to tackling environmental issues, and solid-earth geophysics, including seismic analysis, as well as designing of new materials.

The award-winning performance of the Earth Simulator on the Global FFT demonstrates the system's exceptional processing capabilities on real scientific application software.

Read more...           

Source code changes:

1. Added optimized variants of RandomAccess that use Linear Congruential Generator for random number generation.
2. Made corrections to comments that provide definition of the RandomAccess test.
3. Removed initialization of the main array from the timed section of optimized versions of RandomAccess.
4. Fixed the length of the vector used to compute error when using MPI implementation from FFTW.
5. Added global reduction to error calculation in MPI FFT to achieve more accurate error estimate.
6. Updated documentation in README.

This release is available in the Download section of the HPCC website.

 

This guide is intended to help current HPCC users get better benchmark performance by utilizing Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL).

Read more...

Two powerful Cray XT5 systems at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory computing complex outmuscled competitors to win half of this year's High-Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge awards. Results of the "Best Performance" awards, which measure excellence in handling computing workloads, were announced Nov. 17 at SC09, an international gathering of supercomputing professionals.

Read more...

Two new exploratory lists also are now open for submissions. The Open Green500 will allow supercomputers to use a combination of single-precision and double-precision to generate a correct double-precision result for LINPACK. “We hope that this will stimulate innovation by allowing hardware manufacturers to explore novel architectural solutions while numerical analysts compose novel algorithms to perhaps create a synergistic multi-grid method for LINPACK,” Feng said. Similarly, the second exploratory list will use the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark for its performance results.

Read more...

The STREAM memory benchmark is a widely used synthetic test that measures sustainable memory bandwidth in MB/s.  Memory bandwidth has become more important as CPU vendors start adding more cores to a chip.

Read more...

We are pleased to announce the release of HPCC 1.3.1. This is a bug-fix release that fixes two bugs that were introduced in version 1.3.0. The bugs were in PTRANS and FFT components of the code. Please use this version of the code instead of 1.3.0.

Summary of changes

1. Update version of HPL (import of HPL 2.0 source code)
   • Replaced 32-bit Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG) with a 64-bit one.
   • Removed 3 numerical checks of the solution residual with a single one.
   • Added support for 64-bit systems with large memory sizes (before they would overflow during index calculations 32-bit integers.)
2. Introduction of limit on FFT vector size so they fit in a 32-bit integer (only applicable when using FFTW version 2.)

The second Cluster Challenge was held a few weeks ago in association with SC08 in Austin and, with the cycling theme, has been described as the “Tour de France of SC”.  The peloton consisted of 7 teams gathered from 4 countries to build and run a supercomputer on benchmarks and applications for 46 straight hours.  The level of activity associated with the event is amazing with individuals working intensely until they exhaust themselves and slump in place to sleep (and I have photos to prove that).

Read more...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High Performance Computing Challenge has recognized supercomputers at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory for their superior performance.
The winners were announced at the SC 08 supercomputing conference held here this week.

Read more...

At a presentation at the SC08 semi-annual supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, an engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee who is an expert on the Linpack benchmark, suggested that the methodology used to determine supercomputer performance using Linmark may be behind the times. Specifically, Jack Dongarra -- the man credited with introducing the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark to the Top 500 program -- suggested that as supercomputers get bigger and can store more data, their lag times increase exponentially. This implies that making existing supercomputers bigger and faster eventually leads to a point of diminishing returns.

Read more...

In this paper we introduce how to take advantage of SUSE's latest operating system level (SLES10 sp2) with a standard clustered HPC workload called HPC Challenge. This paper highlights HPC software components like OpenMPI which comes as a free download with SLES10 sp2 and leveraging either the standard gcc which comes with Linux or the IBM commercial compilers available for Power systems.

Read more...

NEC’s SX-9 supercomputer put into operation at Tohoku University’s Cyber Science Center back in April, has achieved the world’s fastest [normalized] standing in the High Performance Computing Challenge benchmark.  The machine scored top marks on 19 of the 28 areas of the test.

Read more...

This guide is intended to help Intel® compiler customers build the HPCC* benchmark. The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark is used to evaluate and test a wide variety of performance parameters for high-performance computing system.

Read more...

The HPC Challenge Benchmark set of tests is primarily High Performance Linpack along with some additional bells-and-whistles tests. The nice thing is the experience in running HPL can be directly leveraged in running HPCC, and vice-versa. Following is a set of commands to get going with HPCC.

Read more...

On Tuesday (November 18th) 12:15 - 1:15 BOF session (1 hour).

The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and IDC are pleased to announce the annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (www.hpcchallenge.org). The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community's attention on developing a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to productively use HPC systems. The awards session will be held during the SC08 conference on Tuesday Number 13th during the 12:15 - 1:15 BOF session in room 14.

Read more... http://scyourway.nacse.org/conference/view/bof114

Please see the detailed instructions for building the Linpack application within the resource file "PortLinpack.zip" via the "Downloads" section of this project.

Read more...

On Tuesday (November 13th) 12:15 – 1:15 BOF session (1 hour).

The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and IDC are pleased to announce the annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (www.hpcchallenge.org). The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community’s attention on developing a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to productively use HPC systems. The awards session will be held during the SC07 conference on Tuesday Number 13th during the 12:15 – 1:15 BOF session in rooms C1 / C2 / C3.

Read more...

We are pleased to announce the long awaited version 1.2 of HPCC. It contains many bug fixes, major features, and minor enhancements many of which were contributed by users. The major focus of this release was to improve accuracy of the reported results and ensure scalability of the code on the largest supercomputer installations with hundreds of thousands of computational cores. Read more...

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite has been funded by the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program to help define the performance boundaries of future Petascale computing systems. HPCC is a suite of tests that examine the performance of high-end architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used in the Top500 list.

This is the 16th edition of a report in which we attempt to give an overview of high-performance computer systems that are commercially available or are expected to become available within a short time frame (typically a few months to half a year).
Read more...

The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and HPCWire are pleased to announce the second annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (www.hpcchallenge.org).
The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community's attention on a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to effectively use HPC systems.

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.

Read more...

A new series of measurements -- the next step in evolution of criteria to determine more accurately the efficiency of supercomputers -- has rated Sandia National Laboratories' Red Storm computer the best in the world in two of six new categories, and very high in two other important categories.
Read more...

When the Energy Department's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center went shopping for a new mid-sized supercomputer, processor speed was a critical factor, as expected. But it also carefully scrutinized the interconnect speeds of the proposed systems.
Read more...

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that the "Red Storm" supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark on a widely used test that measures communications among processors in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and provides a key indication of the total communication capacity of the network.

IBM has dominated the first annual HPC Challenge Competition at the Supercomputing 2005 Conference. The DOE/NNSA/LLNL team, using IBM's Blue Gene/L system, swept all four Class 1 benchmark awards. The IBM team tied with the Cray team for the Class 2 "elegant" implemention award.

In the 17th year of SC, he is serving as the co-chair for the first year of the HPC Challenge award competition, the results of which are being revealed today. The goal of the competition, which is sponsored by DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems Program and HPCwire, is to develop a set of HPC hardware and software capabilities that become de rigeur for the productive use of all HPC systems.

HPCwire recently spoke with Marie-Christine Sawley, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), about its use of the relatively new HPC Challenge benchmark for recent large-scale supercomputer procurement. Although HPCwire expects the U.S. government to begin using the HPC Challenge in procurements soon, CSCS may be the world's first major site to do this.

If there's one thing you can tell by looking at the newest list of the most powerful (read fastest) supercomputers in the world, it's that some real change is taking place in the HPC field. Five of the top 10 systems are new to the list, and over 200 smaller systems from last November's rankings have been eclipsed by faster ones.

According to Cray and AMD, two Cray supercomputer products that leverage the AMD Opteron processor and HyperTransport technology, the Cray XT3 and Cray XD1 systems, have posted leading overall results on the HPC Challenge benchmark tests.

The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and HPCWire are pleased to announce the first annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (http://www.hpcchallenge.org).

Results submitted March 2 by SGI show that a 64-processor SGI Altix system bested similarly configured servers from IBM, Cray and Sun on five of the HPC Challenge (HPCC) Benchmark's list of eight tests. The HPCC benchmark extends the Linpack benchmark used to determine the well-known Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

“The Only Thing Constant Is Change” — Looking back on the last four decades this seems certainly to be true for the market of High-Performance Computing systems (HPC). This market was always characterized by a rapid change of vendors, architectures, technologies and the usage of systems1. Despite all these changes the evolution of performance on a large scale however seems to be a very steady and continuous process.
Read more...

The HPC Challenge benchmark is providing a new in-depth analysis of system performance. The HPC Challenge benchmark clearly shows the strength of parallel vector architectures and highly integrated systems with high bandwidth, low latency memory subsystems.
Read more...

NEC announced that NEC's supercomputer SX-7 installed in Tohoku University has achieved the world's fastest record in 16 benchmarks among 28 on the new benchmark test in HPC (high performance computing), "HPC Challenge Benchmark".
Read more...

The HPCChallenge suite of benchmarks will examine the performance of HPC architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used in the Top500 list.
Read more...

Two alternative methods of benchmarking supercomputers are nearing completion, as the most popular metric for benchmarking performance is being applied Monday to generate a new list of the world's most powerful systems.
Read more...

In the 14th edition of this report we give an overview of high-performance computers which are currently available or will become available within a short time frame from vendors; no attempt is made to list all machines that are still in the research phase. The machines are described according to their architectural class.
Read more...

IBM says its Blue Gene/L, sited in Minnesota, US, attained a sustained performance of 36.01 teraflops when performing the standard benchmark used to test supercomputers, known as the Linpack test.

Is high-performance computing only used in scientific labs? In this interview, Cray Canada chief technology officer Paul Terry answers this question, offers advice on how to choose the right HPC system responds to questions from SearchEnterpriseLinux.com's readers.
Read more...

Linux clusters can not offer the same price-performance as supercomputers, according to Paul Terry, chief technology officer of Burnaby, British Columbia-based Cray Canada. In this interview, Terry explains that assertion and describes Cray's new Linux-based XD1 system, which will be priced competitively with other types of high-end Linux clusters.
Read more...

The simplest punchline is that HPCC Linpack plus the four HPCC memory-access benchmarks give you data so that you can use the locality characteristics of the computational phases of your applications to predict when you will get Linpack-class performance from a given phase and when you will get much less.
Read more...

New Tests Sponsored By Department Of Energy, NSF, DARPA HPCS Program Analyze Memory Access As Well As Processor Performance
Read more...