Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

New SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 benchmark adds data suite for systems with up to 2048 cores

WARRENTON, Va., February 2, 2010 — The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has released a new version of its SPEC MPI2007 benchmark that adds a large data suite designed for systems from 64 to 2048 cores.

SPEC MPI2007, developed by SPEC‟s High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG), measures the performance of parallel computing systems and clusters running actual end-user Message-Passing Interface (MPI) applications. It provides performance metrics that can be used to compare different hardware architectures (SMP, NUMA, clusters) and interconnects, processors, memory hierarchy, compilers, and MPI implementations.

Meeting expanding data needs

The new large data suite in SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 joins the original medium suite designed to work with four to 128 MPI ranks. With V2.0, vendors will be able to publish performance results for up to 2048 MPI ranks. Users will be able to compare performance for these large systems on the SPEC web site or run SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 on their own systems to analyze performance.

"The cliché 'it's a small world' certainly doesn't apply to data, which just keeps expanding," says Kalyan Kumaran, Ph.D., SPEC HPG chair and manager of applications performance engineering at Argonne National Laboratory. "With SPEC MPI2007 V2.0, we're fulfilling the need of the research and science communities for a standardized benchmark suite based on real MPI applications using large datasets."

SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 was developed by SPEC members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Fujitsu, IBM, Indiana University, Intel, Platform Computing, QLogic, SGI, Sun, and Technische Universität Dresden. It supports a wide range of 64-bit architectures, and is portable across Linux, UNIX and Windows operating systems.

Since changes in V2.0 are primarily to the large data suite, vendors will still be able to use SPEC MPI2007 V1.1 to submit results for the medium workload. Results from running the medium data suite in V1.1 are directly comparable to those from the same suite run in V2.0.

Available immediately

SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 is available immediately on DVD for $800 for new licensees and $250 for those upgrading from V1.1 or V1.0. Eligible non-profit organizations can purchase a new license or request an upgrade for $250.

SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 can be ordered online at the SPEC web site (www.spec.org) or by contacting the SPEC office by phone: 540-349-7878, fax: 540-349-5992, or e-mail: info@spec.org. More information and initial performance results for SPEC MPI2007 V2.0 are available on the SPEC web site free of charge.

About SPEC

SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to evaluate performance for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises more than 80 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide.

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