PARKBENCH (PARallel Kernels and BENCHmarks)


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The PARKBENCH (PARallel Kernels and BENCHmarks) committee, originally called the Parallel Benchmark Working Group (PBWG) was founded at Supercomputing '92 in Minneapolis, when a group of about 50 people interested in computer benchmarking met under the joint initiative of Tony Hey and Jack Dongarra, and the chairmanship of Roger Hockney. The objectives of the PARKBENCH group are;
  1. To establish a comprehensive set of parallel benchmarks that is generally accepted by both users and vendors of parallel systems.
  2. To provide a focus for parallel benchmark activities and avoid unnecessary duplication of effort and proliferation of benchmarks.
  3. To set standards for benchmarking methodology and result-reporting together with a control database/repository for both the benchmarks and the results.
  4. To make the benchmarks and results freely available in the public domain.

The initial focus of the parallel benchmarks is on the new generation of scalable distributed memory message-passing architectures for which there is a notable lack of existing benchmarks. For this reason the initial benchmark release concentrates on Fortran77 message-passing codes using the widely-available PVM message-passing interface for portability.

The releases 2.0 of the benchmark suite adopted the MPI interface, Future releases will include Fortran90 and High Performance Fortran (HPF) versions of the benchmark codes. M he comittee is currently working on benchmarks for shared-memory architectures as well.

Further information on PARKBENCH may be obtained by choosing one of the following;

Results from PARKBENCH will be available via the Graphical Benchmark Information Service (GBIS) at two sites:

Choose the closest GBIS site above for the quickest response time.

Information and results relating to many other benchmarking projects may be obtained from the The Performance Database Server (PDS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

For more information about PARKBENCH, see Roger W. Hockney's and Michael Berry's original PARKBENCH paper.


Last Modified Dec 13, 1996