SPEC HPC 2002 : The Next High - Performance Computer Benchmark Extended

The High-Performance Group of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC/HPG) [1] is developing a next release of its high-performance computer benchmark suite. The current suite, SPEChpc96 [2] is expected to be replaced by the SPEC HPC2002 suite in the second quarter of the year 2002. HPC2002 represents a minor update to SPEC’s current high-performance computing benchmarks. In the last subsection of this document we describe SPEC’s longer-term plans. SPEC/HPG currently develops and maintains two benchmark suites, SPEC OMP2001 [3] and SPEC HPC2002. The OMP2001 suite is targeted at sharedmemory platforms that support an OpenMP programming model. By contrast, the HPC2002 makes no restrictions about the target platform. In fact, facilitating cross-platform comparisons was an important motivation that had lead to SPEC’s development of the HPC series of benchmark suites. Compared to the previous suite, SPEC HPC2002 will provide the following changes.