An Evaluation of Sorting as a Supercomputer Benchmark (preliminary Version)
چکیده
We propose that sorting be considered an important benchmark for both scientiic and commercial applications of supercomputers. The purpose of a supercomputer benchmark is to exercise various system components in an eeort to measure important performance characteristics. In the past numerous benchmarks have been deened in an eeort to measure the performance issues associated with numeric computing. These benchmarks stressed arithmetic operations (in particular, oating-point arithmetic). In recent years supercomputers manufactures have started to look closer at non-numeric processing tasks, such as databases and information retrieval. The ability to operate on large amounts of non-numeric data will be crucial in the future. This paper discusses the appropriateness of sorting as a benchmark for non-numeric computing tasks. The paper describes previous work in this area and deenes a set of architecture independent sorting benchmarks.