HepSpecBenchmarks

Contact: Bob Ball, ball@umich.edu.

Summarized Table of Results

All results are 32-bit.

Intel Processors

• ScanWestmere shows a full table of X5650 HS06 results with varying numbers of threads.
  • Westmere_HS06_events2.pdf: X5650 Performance Per Core in Use. Event throughput courtesy of Fred Luehring.

AMD Processors

HT is Hyper-Threading, often called "Logical Cores"

Running the benchmark

General Comments

Running the benchmark at your site requires you to have the spec 2006 benchmark suite/DVD. For educational sites there is a licensing fee of $200 to obtain this, and the fee is paid on a once-per-campus basis. This means that if it is already purchased by someone else at your locale, then you have the right to get a copy from them, and they have the obligation to provide it. This DVD can be purchased on-line with a credit card from the spec.org web site.

Specific Steps to Follow

Next, you should obtain the HS06 "snapshot" file from here. This snapshot is also available by following the "snapshot" link at the TsiBenchHEPSPEC reference URL below. This should be unzipped into some directory on the machine to be bench-marked. The current version of this snapshot is 2.23. The version run at Michigan was 2.14. At first glance the differences appear to be only improvements. I expect the following directions to be the same, though, in either case.

Creating the needed SPECcpu2006 tar file

After obtaining the DVD and the snapshot, you must create the zip file required by the snapshot.

Directions at this URL indicate that we must make a file containing the SPECcpu2006 v1.1 DVD content for our RH systems. This file is called SPEC2006_v11.tar.bz2 and is not contained on the DVD under this name, nor did a simple copy of the DVD content to disk work in creating this file. Upon investigation, I came upon the following sequence that I used to create this archive.

Read the directions here. Specifically read the appendix at the end.

Mount the DVD:   

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,exec /dev/cdrom /media/dvd


Copy files from the DVD into a local "kits" directory (Note I did this via scp to a second 
machine):

cd /home/install/bobdist
mkdir kits
cd kits
scp linat07.local:/media/dvd/install_archives/cpu2006* .


Following directions at the URL above, determine the correct "tools" subdirectory to use from 
the DVD and verify a good copy.

scp linat07.local:/media/dvd/tools/bin/linux-redhat62-ia32/spec* .
./specmd5sum -c cpu2006.tar.bz2.md5


Create the working directory to be used and move into it:  

mkdir SPEC2006_v11
cd SPEC2006_v11


Unpack files into this directory:

/home/install/bobdist/kits/specbzip2 -dc /home/install/bobdist/kits/cpu2006.tar.bz2 | \
    /home/install/bobdist/kits/spectar -xf -


Make the bz2 file needed for the hep-spec benchmark

cd ..
tar cf SPEC2006_v11.tar SPEC2006_v11
bzip2 SPEC2006_v11.tar

The SPEC2006_v11.tar is now ready. It should be copied into the same directory as the balance of the unzipped files from the "snapshot".

Measurements at sites

• Measurements at AGLT2: https://hep.pa.msu.edu/twiki/bin/view/AGLT2/HepSpecResults
• Measurements at MWT2: http://twiki.mwt2.org/bin/view/Main/HepSpecResults

References

• https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/FIOgroup/TsiBenchHEPSPEC
• http://hepix.caspur.it/benchmarks/doku.php?id=bench:howto
• https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/FIOgroup/TsiBenchHEPSPECWlcg
• Table entries for HEPiX taken from http://w3.hepix.org/benchmarks/doku.php?id=bench:results_sl5_x86_64_gcc_432 and from http://w3.hepix.org/benchmarks/doku.php?id=bench:results_sl5_x86_64_gcc_412
  • Results duplicating USATLAS results not added into tables above

-- RobertGardner - 24 Aug 2010