This article is more than 1 year old
SPEC puts forward benchmark for accelerated supers
ACCEL covers OpenCL, OpenACC environments
SPEC – the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation – is pimping a new set of benchmarks it says will help HPC users get the most out of their hardware-accelerated systems.
The “new benchmark suite that measures the performance of systems using hardware accelerator devices and supporting software”, SPEC ACCEL 1.0, comprises 19 applications running under OpenCL and 15 OpenACC applications.
OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, is a royalty-free standard for parallel programming, while OpenACC is an API that allows code from C, C++ and Fortran to be offloaded from a CPU to a hardware accelerator.
The OpenACC suite in ACCEL includes NASA's NAS parallel benchmark suite, described here, and SPEC's own OMP2012 suite.
According to SPEC, “ACCEL exercises the performance of the accelerator, host CPU, memory transfer between host and accelerator, support libraries and drivers, and compilers. Performance results are recorded as the geometric mean of normalised ratios from testing with base and/or peak tuning. Energy consumption is measured in the same manner.”
A handful of SPEC ACCEL results have been collected and are published here. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
