NAS Parallel Benchmarks: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:30, 8 March 2009

Revision as of 07:17, 11 March 2009

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|publisher=NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

|year=March 1994

}}</ref> As a result, NPB were releaseddeveloped in 1991<ref name="nas95020">{{Citation

|last1=Bailey|first1=D.

|last2=Harris|first2=T.

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|year=December 1995

}}

</ref> and released in 1992<ref name="nas03002">{{Citation

</ref> to address the ensuing lack of benchmarks applicable to highly parallel machines.

|last1=Wong|first1=P.

|last2=van der Wijngaart|first2=R.

|contribution=NAS Parallel Benchmarks I/O Version 2.4

|contribution-url=http://www.nas.nasa.gov/News/Techreports/2003/PDF/nas-03-002.pdf

|title=NAS Technical Report NAS-03-002

|publisher=NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

|year=January 2003

}}

</ref> to address the ensuing lack of benchmarks applicable to highly parallel machines.

===NPB 1===

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* capability of accommodating new systems with increased power,

* and ready distributability.

In the light of these guidelines, it was deemed the only viable approach to use a collection of "paper -and -pencil" benchmarks that specified a set of problems only algorithmically and left most implementation details to the implementor's discretion under certain necessary limits.

NPB 1 defined eight benchmarks, each in two problem sizes dubbed ''Class A'' and ''Class B''. Sample code written in [[Fortran 77]] was supplied but not intended for benchmarking purposes.<ref name="rnr94007"/>

===NPB 2===

Since its release, NPB 1 displayed two major weaknesses. Firstly, due to its "paper and pencil" style of specification, computer vendors usually highly tuned their implementations so that their performance became difficult for scientific programmers to attain. Moreover, many of these implementation were proprietary and not publicly available, effectively concealing their optimizing techniques. Secondly, problem sizes of NPB 1 lagged behind the development of supercomputers as the latter continued to evolve.<ref name="nas95020"/>

NPB 2, released in 1996<ref name="npb2.2">{{Citation

|last1=Saphir|first1=W.

|last2=van der Wijngaart|first2=R.

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|publisher=NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

}}

</ref>, came with source code implementations for five out of eight benchmarks defined in NPB 1 to supplement but not replace NPB 1. It updatedextended the benchmarks with a new,an up-to-date problem size ''Class C''. It also amended the rules for submitting benchmarking results. The new rules included explicit requests for output files as well as modified source files and build scripts to ensure public availability of the modifications and reproducibility of the results.<ref name=nas95020/>

NPB 2.2 contained implementations of two more benchmarks.<ref name="npb2.2"/> NPB 2.3 of 1997 was the first complete implemetation in [[Message Passing Interface|MPI]].<ref name="nas03002"/> NPB 2.4 of 2002 offered a new MPI implementation and introduced another still larger problem size ''Class D'' as well as an [[Input/output|I/O]]-intensive benchmark.<ref name="nas03002"/><ref name="nas02007"/>

==References==

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== External links ==

* [http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Software/NPB/ NAS Parallel Benchmarks Changes] (official website)

* [http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/nas/ NAS Kernel Benchmark Program]

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