Network Bandwidth Measurements and Ratio Analysis with the HPC Challenge Benchmark Suite (HPCC)

The HPC Challenge benchmark suite (HPCC) was released to analyze the performance of high-performance computing architectures using several kernels to measure different memory and hardware access patterns comprising latency based measurements, memory streaming, inter-process communication and floating point computation. HPCC defines a set of benchmarks augmenting the High Performance Linpack used in the Top500 list. This paper describes the inter-process communication benchmarks of this suite. Based on the effective bandwidth benchmark, a special parallel random and natural ring communication benchmark has been developed for HPCC. Ping-Pong benchmarks on a set of process pairs can be used for further characterization of a system. This paper analyzes first results achieved with HPCC. The focus of this paper is on the balance between computational speed, memory bandwidth, and inter-node communication.