INDUSTRY

DENVER, CO -- IDC today reported the first rankings of supercomputer performance based on a new, more comprehensive standard test, called the IDC Balanced Rating. The improved test, developed with extensive input from the high-performance computing (HPC) community, is important because industrial competitiveness and scientific progress depend heavily on the capabilities of powerful supercomputers. “Despite the strategic and economic importance of supercomputers, or HPC systems, there has been no widely accepted standard for evaluating their performance,” said Debra Goldfarb, IDC group vice president, Worldwide Systems and Servers. “It is not uncommon for user organizations to find that the actual performance of a new, multi-million-dollar supercomputer is a small fraction of the stellar results produced on today’s limited tests. “The excessive focus on peak performance has contributed to a tendency for HPC vendors to develop new generations of supercomputers showing impressive gains in peak performance while lagging behind in many critical system features,” Goldfarb said. “This has also made it difficult for some HPC users to justify purchasing computers that may provide substantially better performance and value in practice, but don’t maximize the ‘price-to-peak-performance’ ratio.” IDC analyst Earl Joseph II said leading U.S. organizations from government, industry and academia banded together as the HPC User Forum and identified performance measurement as their most crucial concern. “They asked IDC to develop a better standard test of the overall capabilities of the computers, while the HPC User Forum began the more difficult task of creating a benchmark suite to test performance on actual workloads representing a wide range of users.” The IDC Balanced Rating benchmark focuses on three broad performance areas: --Processor performance. The desired measurement is the speed at which the processors could generate results if they were kept fully occupied with work. For the initial IDC Balanced Rating, single processor SPECfp_rate2000 and single processor Linpack Rmax results times the number of processors in the computer are used in the rating. In the future additional processor metrics will be incorporated. --Memory system capability. Actual performance is also dependent on how much data can be moved into and out of the processors in a given time period. For the initial IDC Balanced Rating, total single node bandwidth and the STREAM Machine Balance benchmarks are used. In the future, latency and other metrics will be integrated into the benchmark based on the availability of consistent data on HPC computers. -- Scaling capability. For the initial IDC Balanced Rating, total processor count and total system memory bandwidth are used. For larger computer configurations, only the actual installed configurations are used in the benchmark tables. An important goal of the IDC Balanced Rating is to provide users with comprehensive data on the general capabilities of currently installed HPC systems. A more detailed bulletin, including fuller versions of some tables, is available without charge at hpc@idc.com . 1. Technical Capability Computers: This segment is comprised of systems configured and purchased to solve the largest, most demanding problems. 2. Technical Enterprise Computers: Capacity systems sold for $1 million or more. 3. Technical Divisional Computers: Capacity systems sold from $250,000 to 999,000. 4. Technical Departmental Computers: Capacity systems sold for less than $250,000. For more information visit www.idc.com