HPC Processors Benchmarking Assessment for Global System Science Applications

The work undertaken in this paper was done in the Centre of Excellence for Global Systems Science (CoeGSS) – an interdisciplinary project funded by the European Commission. CoeGSS project provides a computer-aided decision support in the face of global challenges (e.g. development of energy, water and food supply systems, urbanisation processes and growth of the cities, pandemic control, etc.) and tries to bring together HPC and global systems science. This paper presents a proposition of GSS benchmark which evaluates HPC architectures with respect to GSS applications and seeks for the best HPC system for typical GSS software environments. The outcome of the analysis is defining a benchmark which represents the average GSS environment and its challenges in a good way: spread of smoking habits and development of tobacco industry, development of green cars market and global urbanisation processes. Results of the tests that have been run on a number of recently appeared HPC platforms allow comparing processors’ architectures with respect to different applications using execution times, TDPs3 and TCOs4 as the basic metrics for ranking HPC architectures. Finally, we believe that our analysis of the results conveys a valuable information to the broadened GSS audience which might help to determine the hardware demands for their specific applications, as well as to the HPC community which requires a mature benchmark set reflecting requirements and traits of the GSS applications. Our work can be considered as a step into direction of development of such mature benchmark.