Cluster Benchmarking Packages

Here are some links to benchmarks:

Benchmark Suites

• HPCC Challange Benchmark - uses seven tests to measure several different performance parameters.
• Beowulf Perforamnce Suite (BPS) - Example results are here.
• Cluster Monkey Benchmark Project - just started. It is based on the BPS.
• NASA Parallel Benchmarks - One of the most, if not the most, widely used set of benchmarks for clusters.
• Intel MPI Benchmarks - freely available.
• perfbase - a set of front end tools using a PostgreSQL database as backend, which together form a system for the management and analysis of the output of tests and experiments.
• SKaMPI - a suite of tests designed to measure the performance of MPI.

File Systems I/O

• GPFS vs. NFS evaluation
• EXT3, EXT3, Reiser, JFS, XFS benchmarks Part 1 and Part 2
• Cluster Monkey Series on Parallel File System Benchmarking
  • Benchmarking Parallel File Systems
  • A Benchmark for Parallel File Systems
  • Using the PIO Benchmark
• nfs-test is a program that tries a bunch of different rsizes, wsizes, protocols (tcp vs udp) and NFS versions to optimize performance
• IOZONE Filesystem Benchmark
• MPI-IO Test LANL's MPI-IO Test (The best test for MPI-IO codes)
• Livermore File System Tests A collection of tests from Lawrence Livermore for testing parallel IO file systems. This include IOR (a great test for parallel file systems) and a bunch of metadata tests

Individual Codes for Benchmarks

These are codes that you can download (freely) and use for benchmarking. Some of them have benchmark results available and some don't.

• Gromacs - A great benchmark code. GROMACS is a versatile package to perform molecular dynamics, i.e. simulate the Newtonian equations of motion for systems with hundreds to millions of particles. It is primarily designed for biochemical molecules like proteins and lipids that have a lot of complicated bonded interactions.\
• HMMER HMMER is used for profiling hidden Markov models (profile HMMs) to do sensitive database searching using statistical descriptions of a sequence family's consensus. HMMER is a freely distributable implementation of profile HMM software for protein sequence analysis.
• Gerris - Gerris is an Open Source Free Software library for the solution of the partial differential equations describing fluid flow.
• ParaCFD While this is an old CFD benchmark, I think it is still useful. It contains both an OpenMP version and a MPI version.
• MGNet - A collection of Multi-Grid codes that you can use for benchmarking. There are no published results, but there are some MPI codes that you can use for benchmarks.

Network Benchmarks

These benchmarks can be used to test the networking aspects of cluster codes. Some of them can test the entire fabric and some test just a pair of nodes.

• NetPIPE - One of the best network benchmarks. It tests a range of packet sizes and measures the time (bandwidth). It can use MPI as the message sending mechanism so it allows you to also test MPI implementations.
• Netperf - Another good networking benchmark that is used frequently.