What is the difference between SPEC HPC2002 and other benchmarks for high-performance systems?
The most important distinction is that SPEC HPC2002 includes applications used in industry and research to do real work. These applications normally run on multiprocessing systems and require the larger computing resources offered by high-end systems. Only minimal modifications were made to the applications used in the SPEC HPC2002 suite. By leaving even “uninteresting” functions of the application code intact, SPEC HPC2002 provides a realistic measure of real-world application performance. SPEC/HPG’s methodology differs from previous benchmarking efforts, which concentrated only on more numerically intensive algorithms. A second distinction is that SPEC HPC2002 targets all high-performance computer architectures. The applications in the suite are currently in use on a wide variety of systems, including workstations, clusters, SMPs, vector systems and MPPs. The programming models used in the SPEC HPC2002 application codes — message-passing, shared-memory parallel, and serial models —
