Why doesn SPEC/HPG define a metric such as M/FLOPS or price/performance?
SPEC/HPG chose to focus on total application performance for large, industrially relevant applications. Within this benchmarking environment, a simple metric such as M/FLOPS is inadequate and misleading. Customers need to understand the expected performance of systems under consideration for purchase. Real-world performance includes all of the set-up, computation and post-processing work. Since the pre- and post-processing phases of applications can be significant factors in total system performance, SPEC/HPG chose to concentrate on total system performance.
