NAS Parallel Benchmarks: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:44, 24 February 2009

Revision as of 18:30, 8 March 2009

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|website=http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Software/NPB/

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The '''NAS Parallel Benchmarks''' ('''NPB''') are a set of [[benchmark (computing)|benchmark]]s targettingtargeting performance evaluation of highly parallel [[supercomputer]]s. They are developed and maintained by the [[NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility|NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division]] (formerly the [[NASA]] [[NASA Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Program|Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Program]]) based at the [[NASA Ames Research Center]]. NAS solicits performance results for NPB from all sources.<ref name="npbweb">{{cite web

|title=NAS Parallel Benchmarks Changes

|url=http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Resources/Software/npb.html

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==History==

===Motivation===

Traditional benckmarksbenchmarks that existed before NPB, such as the [[Livermore loops]], the [[LINPACK|LINPACK Benchmark]] and the [[NAS Kernel Benchmark Program]], were usually specialized for vector computers. They generalllygenerally suffered from inadequacies including parallelism-impeding tuning restrictions and insufficient problem sizes, which rendered them inappropriate for highly parallel systems. Equally unsuitable were full-scale application benchmarks due to high porting cost and unavailability of automatic software parallelization tools.<ref name="rnr94007">{{Citation

|last1=Baily|first1=D.

|last2=Barscz|first2=E.

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* genericness and architecture neutrality,

* easy verifiability of correctness of results and performance figures,

* capability of accomodatingaccommodating 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.

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===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 scienctificscientific 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