Why does HPC2002 only have a “peak” but no baseline metric?
In contrast to other SPEC benchmark suites, SPEC HPC2002 includes only one metric per code and data size. There are no “base” results that would measure compiler-only performance. The SPEC HPC2002 runrules allow certain hand optimizations for all metrics. Since high-performance computer customers are willing to invest programming time to tune the applications that run on their systems, a baseline result has little meaning to them. Also, the architectures employed in the high-performance computing market are far more diverse than those found in single-CPU workstations. The baseline or “out-of-the-box” performance of any given application has no correlation to the actual performance a customer could expect to achieve on a particular architecture.
