The Nas Parallel Benchmarks

TITLE: The NAS Parallel Benchmarks AUTHOR: David H Bailey 1 ACRONYMS: NAS, NPB DEFINITION: The NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) are a suite of parallel computer per- formance benchmarks. They were originally developed at the NASA Ames Re- search Center in 1991 to assess high-end parallel supercomputers [?]. Although they are no longer used as widely as they once were for comparing high-end sys- tem performance, they continue to be studied and analyzed a great deal in the high-performance computing community. The acronym “NAS” originally stood for the Numerical Aeronautical Simulation Program at NASA Ames. The name of this organization was subsequently changed to the Numerical Aerospace Sim- ulation Program, and more recently to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Center, although the acronym remains “NAS.” The developers of the original NPB suite were David H. Bailey, Eric Barszcz, John Barton, David Browning, Russell Carter, LeoDagum, Rod Fatoohi, Samuel Fineberg, Paul Frederickson, Thomas Lasinski, Rob Schreiber, Horst Simon, V. Venkatakrishnan and Sisira Weeratunga. DISCUSSION: The original NAS Parallel Benchmarks consisted of eight individual bench- mark problems, each of which focused on some aspect of scientific computing. The principal focus was in computational aerophysics, although most of these benchmarks have much broader relevance, since in a much larger sense they are typical of many real-world scientific computing applications. The NPB suite grew out of the need for a more rational procedure to select new supercomputers for acquisition by NASA. The emergence of commercially available highly parallel computer systems in the late 1980s offered an attrac- tive alternative to parallel vector supercomputers that had been the mainstay of high-end scientific computing. However, the introduction of highly parallel systems was accompanied by a regrettable level of hype, not only on the part of the commercial vendors but even, in some cases, by scientists using the sys- tems. As a result, it was difficult to discern whether the new systems offered any fundamental performance advantage over vector supercomputers, and, if so, which of the parallel offerings would be most useful in real-world scientific computation. 1 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA, dhbailey@lbl.gov. Supported in part by the Director, Office of Computational and Technology Research, Division of Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy, under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231.