PRACE Benchmark Suite Finalised

The benchmark suite covers application areas from the PRACE Research Infrastructure’s future user base, ranging from particle physics through computational chemistry and fluid dynamics to earth sciences and astronomy. The selected applications have enough scalability potential to run on petascale systems and beyond.
Several aspects were taken into account when creating the final benchmark suite: PRACE investigated the actual usage of scientific applications in Europe, including their industrial usage, and the scalability and performance of the applications were tested on the PRACE prototype Tier-0 platforms.
The PRACE benchmark suite was prepared in such a way that it offers high flexibility. This includes the possibility to use a subset of the full benchmark suite for procurement of specific Tier-0 architectures. Ease of use of the benchmark suite is assured by its integration into the flexible JUBE (Jülich Benchmark Environment) framework, which includes verification procedures.

The applications selected for the PRACE application benchmark suite are:

QCD, particle physics              
Quantum_Espresso, computational chemistry                     
NAMD, computational chemistry
CPMD, computational chemistry
Code_Saturne, computational fluid dynamics
GADGET, astronomy and cosmology
TORB/EUTERPE, plasma physics
WRF, atmospheric modelling
NEMO, ocean modelling
CP2K, computational chemistry
GROMACS, computational chemistry
NS3D, computational fluid dynamics            
AVBP, computational fluid dynamics
HELIUM, computational physics
TRIPOLI-4, computational engineering
PEPC, plasma physics
GPAW, computational chemistry
ALYA, computational mechanics
OCTOPUS, computational chemistry
BSIT, computational geophysics
ELMER, computational engineering
SPECFEM3D, computational geophysics

More information: Peter Michielse, e-mail: p.michielse@nwo.nl and Mark Bull, e-mail: markb@epcc.ed.ac.uk

About PRACE: The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. PRACE is a project funded in part by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme. The PRACE project receives funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211528.