HEP-SPEC06 (HS06)

THIS PAGE IS PROVIDED FOR LEGACY REASONS AS IT PERTAINS TO THE PREVIOUSLY OFFICIAL BENCHMARK, HS06, REPLACED BY HEPSCORE23 SINCE APRIL 2023.

HS06 is the 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 It has been developed by the HEPiX Benchmarking Working Group in order to replace the outdated “kSI2k” metric.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.

HS06 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.

HS06 is the official CPU performance metric to be used by WLCG sites since 1 April 2009.

Although the HS06 benchmark was initially designed to meet the requirements of High Energy Physics (HEP) labs, it is by now widely used also by other communities.

Tables of HS06 results

Default system configurations

• SL7/CC7 x86_64 (gcc-4.8.x)
• SL6 x86_64 (gcc-4.4.x)

Other system configurations (for academic use)

• SL6 x86_64 (gcc-4.8.x)
• SL5 x86_64 (gcc-4.4.6)
• SL5 x86_64 (gcc-4.3.2)

Retired configurations

• SL5 x86_64 (gcc-4.1.2)
• SL4 x86_64 (gcc-3.4.6)
• SL4 i386 (gcc-3.4.6)

How to run the benchmark

• See the dedicated page

---

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