Why does SPEC use reference machines? What machines were used for SPEC MPI2007?
SPEC uses a reference machine to normalize the performance metrics used in the MPI2007 suites. Each benchmark is run and measured on this machine to establish a reference time for that benchmark. These times are then used in the SPEC calculations. Note that the medium and large data set benchmarks use two different reference machines: medium data set: The reference machine is an 8-node cluster of Celestica A2210 (AMD Serenade) systems connected by a TCP (GigE) Interconnect. Each A2210 system contains two 940 sockets, each holding one single-core AMD Opteron 848 processor chip running at 2200 MHz with 1 MB I+D L2 cache, plus 4 GB of DDR 333 memory per socket. The MPI implementation is MPICH2 version 1.0.3 running on SLES 9 SP3 Linux OS with Pathscale 2.5 compilers. Measurements of the reference platform are posted on the SPEC Website. 16 ranks were used. large data set: The reference machine is a 64-node cluster of Intel SR1560SF systems connected by a TCP (GigE) Interconnect (oversubsc