[Beowulf] [External] Re: HPCG benchmark, again

[Prentice Bisbal]

>
>   Maybe it's time to update the saying that 'numbers never lie' to 
> something more accurate - 'numbers never lie, but they also rarely 
> tell the whole story'.
>
May I offer you a different saying in these trying times?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

Prentice Bisbal
Senior HPC Engineer
Computational Sciences Department
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
https://cs.pppl.gov
https://www.pppl.gov

On 3/18/22 8:20 PM, Brian Dobbins wrote:
>
> Hi Jorg,
>
>   We (NCAR - weather/climate applications) tend to find that HPCG more 
> closely tracks the performance we see from hardware than Linpack, so 
> it definitely is of interest and watched, but our procurements tend to 
> use actual code that vendors run as part of the process, so we don't 
> 'just' use published HPCG numbers.  Still, I'd say it's still very 
> much a useful number, though.
>
>   As one example, while I haven't seen HPCG numbers for the MI250x 
> accelerators, Prof. Matuoka of RIKEN tweeted back in November that he 
> anticipated that to score around 0.4% of peak on HPCG, vs 2% on the 
> NVIDIA A100 (while the A64FX they use hits an impressive 3%):
> https://twitter.com/ProfMatsuoka/status/1458159517590384640
>
>   Why is that relevant?  Well, /on paper/, the MI250X has ~96 TF FP64 
> w/ Matrix operations, vs 19.5 TF on the A100. So, 5x in theory, but 
> Prof Matsuoka anticipated a ~5x differential in HPCG, /erasing/ that 
> differential.  Now, surely /someone/ has HPCG numbers on the MI250X, 
> but I've not yet seen any.  Would love to know what they are.  But 
> absent that information I tend to bet Matsuoka isn't far off the mark.
>
>   Ultimately, it may help knowing more about what kind of applications 
> you run - for memory bound CFD-like codes, HPCG tends to be pretty 
> representative.
>
>   Maybe it's time to update the saying that 'numbers never lie' to 
> something more accurate - 'numbers never lie, but they also rarely 
> tell the whole story'.
>
>   Cheers,
>   - Brian
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 5:08 PM Jörg Saßmannshausen 
> <sassy-work at sassy.formativ.net> wrote:
>
>     Dear all,
>
>     further the emails back in 2020 around the HPCG benchmark test, as
>     we are in
>     the process of getting a new cluster I was wondering if somebody
>     else in the
>     meantime has used that test to benchmark the particular
>     performance of the
>     cluster.
>     From what I can see, the latest HPCG version is 3.1 from August
>     2019. I also
>     have noticed that their website has a link to download a version
>     which
>     includes the latest A100 GPUs from nVidia.
>     https://www.hpcg-benchmark.org/software/view.html?id=280
>
>     What I was wondering is: has anybody else apart from Prentice
>     tried that test
>     and is it somehow useful, or does it just give you another set of
>     numbers?
>
>     Our new cluster will not be at the same league as the
>     supercomputers, but we
>     would like to have at least some kind of handle so we can compare
>     the various
>     offers from vendors. My hunch is the benchmark will somehow
>     (strongly?) depend
>     on how it is tuned. As my former colleague used to say: I am
>     looking for some
>     war stories (not very apt to say these days!).
>
>     Either way, I hope you are all well given the strange new world we
>     are living
>     in right now.
>
>     All the best from a spring like dark London
>
>     Jörg
>
>
>
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