Introduction

HEP-SPEC06 is the new HEP-wide benchmark for measuring CPU performance. It has been developed by the HEPiX Benchmarking Working Group in order to replace the outdated “kSI2k” metric.

The goal is to provide a consistent and reproducible CPU benchmark to describe experiment requirements, lab commitments, existing compute resources, as well as procurements of new hardware.

HEP-SPEC06 is based on the all_cpp benchmark subset (bset) of the widely used, industry standard SPEC® CPU2006 benchmark suite. This bset matches the percentage of floating point operations which we have observed in batch jobs (~10%), and it scales perfectly with the experiment codes.

HEP-SPEC06 is the official CPU performance metric to be used by WLCG sites since 1 April 2009.

Although the HEP-SPEC06 benchmark was initially designed to meet the requirements of High Energy Physics (HEP) labs, it is by now widely used also by other communities.

• SL 5 x86_64 (gcc-4.3.2)
• SL 5 x86_64 (gcc-4.1.2)
• SL 4 x86_64 (gcc-3.4.6)
• SL 4 i386 (gcc-3.4.6)

• Here you can find instructions how to run the benchmark.

SPEC® is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), www.spec.org.