The Case for a Better HPC Benchmark

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Mark Anderson at IEEE Spectrum writes that it’s time for high-performance computers to be rated not just in petaflops (quadrillions of floating-point operations per second) but also in “gigateps” (billions of traversed edges per second).

What we’re most interested in is being able to traverse the whole memory of the machine,” says Richard Murphy, a senior researcher at Sandia National Laboratory, in Albuquerque, N.M. “There’s no equivalent measure for these problems that’s accepted industry-wide.”

While the Graph500 may be future of HPC benchmarking, I’m thinking that gigateps sounds a little too much like the title of that Bruce Campbell movie where Elvis fights the Mummy.