Supporting and Enhancing the HPC Challenge Benchmark for Hybrid-Multicore Computers

几乎每个关键科学领域的加速进展与提高高性能计算（HPC）的可用性之间存在着紧密的耦合，这意味着致力于支持前沿研究的机构将不得不继续甚至扩大对高端计算能力的投资。不幸的是，新的极端规模平台带来的系统架构的根本变化（大规模并发、处理器异构性、受限的功率预算和复杂的内存架构）也削弱了我们以理性和明智的方式做出此类投资决策的能力。特别是，HPC Challenge（HPCC）基准套件等工具在评估系统设计选择对科学应用性能的影响方面发挥了至关重要的作用，但它们并没有很好地适应新兴超级计算平台令人难以置信的复杂性。我们提出的支持和增强混合多核计算机的HPCC基准测试的计划旨在保持和扩展这一重要工具的有效性。因此，我们的HPCC更新和增强计划将集中在三个主要方面：1）研究新的基准测试执行规则; 2）提高基准测试的可扩展性，以适应未来的体系结构; 3）扩大社区互动。在为国家网络基础设施做出贡献方面，计划中的工作建立在并加强了我们与NSF中心和HPC供应商的持续合作基础上。我们参与了NSF中心，拥有广泛的用户和应用程序可供借鉴。这些设施为HPCC提供软件和专业知识，并将为HPCC开发的新技术和应用概念提供早期操作测试平台。供应商对我们计划的反应令人鼓舞。在他们的合作下，我们将生产软件，这些软件将过渡到商业软件供应商，以完成我们已经启动的开发，并向研究社区的客户提供这些新功能。

The tight coupling that now exists between accelerating progress in nearly every critical scientific field and increasing the availability of high performance computing (HPC) means that agencies committed to supporting leading edge research will have to continue, or even expand, their investment in high end computing capacity. Unfortunately, the radical changes in system architecture that new extreme scale platforms are bringing with them (massive concurrency, processor heterogeneity, constrained power budgets, and complex memory architectures) are also crippling our ability to make such investment decisions in a rational and well-informed way. In particular, tools such as the HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite, which have played a vitally important role in evaluating the impact of system design choices on the performance of scientific applications, are not as well adapted as they need to be to the incredible complexities of emerging supercomputing platforms. Our proposed plan for supporting and enhancing the HPCC benchmark for hybrid-multicore computers is designed to maintain and extend the effectiveness of this essential tool.Accordingly, our plan for updating and enhancing HPCC will focus on three main areas of activity: 1) investigate new rules for benchmark execution; 2) improve scalability of benchmark for future architectures; and 3) expand community interaction.In terms of contributing to national cyberinfrastructure, the planned work builds upon and strengthens our ongoing collaborations with NSF Centers and HPC vendors. We are involved in the NSF Centers and have a wide collection of users and applications to draw on. These facilities contribute software and expertise to HPCC and will provide an early operational testbed for new technologies and application concepts to be developed for HPCC. Responses to our plans from vendors have been encouraging. With their cooperation, we will produce software that will be transitioned to the commercial software vendors to complete the development that we have initiated and provide these new capabilities to their customers in the research community.