🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun05.185818.1071@convex.com> patrick@convex.COM (Patrick F. McGehearty) writes:
>the most out of a machine under ideal circumstances.  The requirement
>that it also run on some other machine is intended to avoid machine
>specific system calls.  Does this benchmark idea sound interesting to
>anyone else?

Yes and no.  Yes, because your idea would level the playing field and
give people a feeling for what one might expect if you weren't able or
willing to exploit the special aspects of a system.  No, because one also
wants to know just how much can be milked from a supercomputer.  Perhaps
what we need is both sets of benchmarks.

I must admit however, I would like to see LINPACK benchmarks which tackle
matrices of a size more on the order of 10,000 to 100,000.  I can trivially
invert a 1000 x 1000 in a few seconds on my Sparc.  Telling me how fast
I can do it on a supercomputer doesn't really tell me much about how a
system performs on the kinds of problems I need it for.  Allowing the
benchmarker to scale the problem to his or her physical memory would
seem to me to be a prescription for getting alot of results that can't be
compared to each other.  What I would prefer is to just fix the 
dimension, but fix it big.  That would give a standard benchmark, but
more importantly, from the perspective of a prospective user, it tells me
how well the system can handle real problems, not ones choosen to scale
nicely to a particular architecture.

John


-- 
John K. Prentice    john@spectre.unm.edu (Internet)
Computational Physics Group
Amparo Corporation, Albuquerque, NM