SPEC High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) seeks applications for upcoming MPI accelerator benchmark

GAINESVILLE, Va., May 23, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.'s High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) is offering rewards of up to $5,000 and a free benchmark license for application code and datasets accepted under its new SPEC MPI Accelerator Benchmark Search Program.

Applications that make it through the entire search program will be incorporated into a new benchmark currently called SPEC MPI ACCEL. The new benchmark will combine components of the current SPEC MPI and SPEC ACCEL benchmark suites.

Real-world scientific applications

"Our goal is to develop a benchmark that contains real-world scientific applications and scales from a single node of a supercomputer to thousands of nodes," says Robert Henschel, SPEC/HPG chair. "The broader the base of contributors, the better the chance that we can cover a wide range of scientific disciplines and parallel-programming paradigms."

The search program is ope to individual and group submissions from industry, academia and research communities. Monetary rewards will be provided upon successful completion of escalating steps in the evaluation process, including successful initial porting, providing workloads and benchmark profiling, code testing and benchmark infrastructure, and final acceptance into the new benchmark suite.

Beyond the monetary reward

Beyond the monetary reward, free benchmark license and industry recognition, those whose applications are selected under the search program will benefit from seeing a large number of performance results published on the SPEC website, giving them a better understanding of how their applications scale. Currently, there are more than 500 performance results posted on the SPEC website for SPEC ACCEL and SPEC MPI benchmarks.

Henschel says the search program is important to SPEC/HPG because the new benchmark is a departure from those in the past that focus on very specific parallelization techniques, such as MPI, OpenMP and OpenACC.

"This new benchmark is a fresh start for SPEC/HPG, as we are trying to include a much broader set of parallelization techniques in order to better exploit modern HPC architectures and better represent the landscape of scientific applications."

Deadline: December 31, 2017

Proposals for the SPEC MPI Accelerator Benchmark Search Program will be accepted from now until December 31, 2017 at 11:59 U.S. Pacific Standard Time.   For more information on the program and an entry form, visit http://www.spec.org/hpg/search/.

About SPEC

SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy consumption for the newest generation of computing systems.  Its membership comprises more than 120 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide. 

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