An Introduction to the SPEC High Performance Group and their HPC Benchmark Suites

The SPEC High-Performance Group (HPG) develops benchmarks that:

• represent large, real applications, in scientific and technical computing,
• use industry standard parallel application programming interfaces (APIs), OpenMP and MPI
• support shared-memory and message passing programming paradigms,
• can evaluate shared-memory computers, distributed-memory computers and workstation clusters as well as traditional massively parallel processor computers,
• come in several data sets sizes (from a few minutes to days of execution time),
• allow for certain hand optimizations of the codes (as opposed to compiler-only optimizations)