The LINPACK Benchmark



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The LINPACK Benchmark

The LINPACK benchmark features solving a system of linear equation, . The benchmark results examined here are for two distinct benchmark problems. The first problem uses Fortran software from the LINPACK software package to solve a matrix problem of order 100. That is, the matrix has 100 rows and columns and is said to be of size . The software used in this experiment is based on two routines from the LINPACK collection: DGEFA and DGESL. DGEFA performs the decomposition with partial pivoting, and DGESL uses that decomposition to solve the given system of linear equations. Most of the time - floating-point operations - is spent in DGEFA. Once the matrix has been decomposed, DGESL is used to find the solution; this requires floating-point operations.

DGEFA and DGESL in turn call three BLAS routines: DAXPY, IDAMAX, and DSCAL. For the size 100 benchmark, the BLAS used are written in Fortran. By far the major portion of time - over 90% at order 100 - is spent in subroutine DAXPY. DAXPY is used to multiply a scalar, , times a vector, , and add the results to another vector, . It is called approximately times by DGEFA and times by DGESL with vectors of varying length. The statement , which forms an element of the DAXPY operation, is executed approximately times, which gives rise to roughly floating-point operations in the solution. Thus, the benchmark requires roughly 2/3 million floating-point operations.

The statement , besides the floating-point addition and floating-point multiplication, involves a few one-dimensional index operations and storage references. While the LINPACK routines DGEFA and DGESL involve two-dimensional arrays references, the BLAS refer to one-dimensional arrays. The LINPACK routines in general have been organized to access two-dimensional arrays by column. In DGEFA, the call to DAXPY passes an address into the two-dimensional array A, which is then treated as a one-dimensional reference within DAXPY. Since the indexing is down a column of the two-dimensional array, the references to the one-dimensional array are sequential with unit stride. This is a performance enhancement over, say, addressing across the column of a two-dimensional array. Since Fortran dictates that two-dimensional arrays be stored by column in memory, accesses to consecutive elements of a column lead to simple index calculations. References to consecutive elements differ by one word instead of by the leading dimension of the two-dimensional array.

If we examine the algorithm used in LINPACK and look at how the data are referenced, we see that at each step of the factorization process there are operations that modify a full submatrix of data. This update causes a block of data to be read, updated, and written back to central memory. The number of floating-point operations is , and the number of data references, both loads and stores, is . Thus, for every add/multiply pair we must perform a load and store of the elements, unfortunately obtaining no reuse of data. Even though the operations are fully vectorized, there is a significant bottleneck in data movement, resulting in poor performance. To achieve high-performance rates, this operation-to-memory-reference rate must be higher.

The bottleneck is in moving data and the rate of execution are limited by these quantities. We can see this by examining the rate of data transfers and the peak performance.



next up previous
Next: Restructuring Algorithms Up: Computation and Communication Previous: Performance



Jack Dongarra
Fri Aug 4 04:24:58 EDT 1995