An Evaluation of Sorting as a Supercomputer Benchmark (preliminary Version)

We propose that sorting be considered an important benchmark for both scientific and commercial applications of supercomputers. The purpose of a supercomputer benchmark is to exercise various system components in an effort to measure important performance characteristics. In the past numerous benchmarks have been defined in an effort to measure the performance issues associated with numeric computing. These benchmarks stressed arithmetic operations (in particular, floating-point arithmetic). In recent years supercomputers manufactures have started to look closer at non-numeric processing tasks, such as databases and information retrieval. Tile ability to operate on large amounts of non-numeric data will be crucial in tile future. This paper discusses the appropriateness of sorting as a benchmark for non-numeric computing tasks. The paper describes previous work in this area and defines a set of architecture independent sorting benchmarks. 1School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. This research was sponsored in part by the Avionics Laboratory, Wright Research and Development Center, Aeronautical Systems Division (AFSC), U.S. Air Force, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio 45433-6543 under Contract F3361590-C-1465, ARPA Order No. 7597 2NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035. The author is an employee of Computer Sciences Corp. Work funded by NASA Contract NAS 2-12961. 3Thinking Machines Corporation, 245 First Street, Cambridge, MA 02143. An Evaluation of Sorting as a Supercomputer Benchmark (preliminary version)

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