Benchmark Testing Goes Custom

IBM Benchmark Centers help organizations evaluate their HPC workloads

How will my application scale on the IBM high-performance computing (HPC) solution I’m evaluating? Will it work in my custom environment? Which specific configuration will best support my business objectives?

When organizations ask questions like these, industry-standard benchmarks don’t always provide the answers. Fortunately, IBM’s worldwide network of IBM Benchmark Centers can help provide answers by generating information unique to the specific environment.

One-size testing does not fit all
Customization is key. It’s important to remember that while industrystandard benchmarks are based on workloads predefined by a standards body, benchmarking a custom environment typically requires a custom workload or custom input to independent software vendor (ISV) application packages. To accurately test these situations, IBM Benchmark Centers work with individual clients to port, measure and tune codes to unique requirements so clients can fully evaluate IBM server and storage systems.

At these benchmarking centers, clients select from a range of services that best fit their requirements. For complex or large-scale projects, IBM frequently sets up dedicated access to large clusters. In less complex situations, lightweight benchmarking typically is provided by the center’s HPC Express offering, which includes a highly flexible computing infrastructure available as an intranet cloud.

To match particular environments, HPC Express features a variety of hardware technologies—including IBM® Power Systems™, BladeCenter® and System x® iDataPlex™ systems—featuring the latest Intel® Xeon® or AMD Opteron™ processors and high-speed interconnect options. In addition, a dedicated benchmark center is available for Blue Gene®/P technology evaluation in Rochester, MN. The HPC benchmark environments also showcase IBM storage with Generalized Parallel File System (GPFS) software, IBM and third-party compilers, libraries, provisioning and scheduling software and other productivity tools.

HPC productivity speeds time to market
Thanks to this dynamic approach, IBM Benchmark Center services can help companies discover dramatic productivity gains. Companies across a broad set of industries have leveraged benchmark centers’ infrastructure and skills to evaluate the performance and scalability of their applications. IBM HPC experts work hand in hand with clients to optimize codes for multi-core and clustered architectures, identifying bottlenecks and making tuning recommendations. As a result of these benchmarking efforts, significant improvement in execution time and throughput are revealed in applications such as reservoir modeling in the energy industry or risk analytics in the financial services industry.

Academia discovers more ways to speed up research
In addition to leading business organizations, users of the benchmark centers also include educational and research institutions around the world. Researchers often need to evaluate how their most resourceintensive applications would perform on IBM supercomputers. An IBM Benchmark Center can help researchers perform early validation and tuning, helping them accelerate their projects and subsequent research efforts.

Examples abound. Take the case of the Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC), which benchmarked its climatology applications on IBM servers and storage as part of a competitive evaluation of HPC systems. Or, on the other side of the globe, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore used IBM benchmarking services to confirm that its new System x iDataplex cluster would make it onto the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers.

The right testing information helps produce the right HPC decisions
Armed with benchmarking information, organizations can make the right HPC decisions to push the boundaries of research, design and development. Thanks to IBM Benchmarking Centers around the world, businesses and research organizations have ready access to information for specific environments—whether organizations are benchmarking applications as
part of a competitive evaluation, solving problems before implementing HPC systems or answering unique questions about performance and scalability—which, in the long run, saves both time and expense.

Additional information is available at ibm.com/systems/services/benchmarkcenter

You can contact a benchmark center expert by e-mail at ppsbench@us.ibm.com.