RATIONALE FOR COMPACT APPLICATION BENCHMARKS

While the PARKBENCH kernel applications provide a fairly straightforward way of assessing the performance of a parallel system, they are not representative of scientific applications in general since they do not reflect certain types of system behavior. In particular, many scientific applications involve data movement between phases of an application, and may also require significant amounts of I/O. These types of behavior are difficult to gauge using kernel applications.

One factor that has hindered the use of full application codes for benchmarking parallel computers in the past is that such codes are difficult to parallelize and to port between target architectures. In addition, full application codes that have been successfully parallelized are often proprietary, and/or subject to distribution restrictions. To minimize the negative impact of these factors compact applications are made use of in the PARKBENCH benchmarking effort.

PARKBENCH compact applications page

Last Modified May 14, 1996