BENCHMARKING
HPC Benchmarking Services
Unlock the Full Potential of Your HPC Environment
What is HPC Benchmarking?
HPC benchmarking is the process of evaluating the performance of a high-performance computing system through a series of tests designed to measure the efficiency of the hardware, software, and network components. These benchmarks help identify bottlenecks, determine system capabilities, and provide guidance for optimizations.
Our benchmarking services focus on several key performance areas:
- Compute Performance: CPU/GPU efficiency and multi-threading capabilities.
- Memory Bandwidth and Latency: Evaluation of data movement between processors and memory.
- I/O Performance: Speed of data reads/writes to storage systems.
- Network Latency and Throughput: Intra-node and inter-node communication efficiency, especially important for parallel workloads.
- Scalability: How well your system handles increasing workloads across distributed nodes.
Why is HPC Benchmarking Important?
Benchmarking is critical to ensure that your HPC infrastructure is optimized for your specific workloads. Whether you are running climate simulations, AI model training, or large-scale data analytics, the efficiency of your HPC environment has a direct impact on your productivity and operational costs.
- Identify Bottlenecks: Uncover areas where performance is suboptimal, such as inefficient hardware utilization, memory bottlenecks, or network latency.
- Optimize Resources: Ensure that your HPC system is using available resources like CPUs, GPUs, memory, and storage most efficiently.
- Plan for Growth: Benchmarking helps you understand the scalability limits of your current system, guiding future capacity planning.
- Compare Systems: Evaluate different hardware and software configurations to choose the best solution for your specific needs.
- Ensure Return on Investment: Maximize the ROI of your HPC investment by ensuring the system is tuned for peak performance.
Our HPC Benchmarking Process
Our benchmarking service involves a comprehensive analysis of your system’s performance across various metrics.
The process is divided into four key steps:
1. Initial Assessment
Before running benchmarks, we conduct an in-depth assessment of your current HPC environment.
This involves:
- Understanding Workloads: We assess the types of workloads you typically run (e.g., simulations, machine learning, big data processing) to determine which benchmarks will provide the most relevant insights.
- System Configuration Review: We review your hardware and software stack, including processors (CPU, GPU), memory, storage, and networking infrastructure.
2. Selection of Benchmark Tools
We use a range of industry-standard benchmarking tools tailored to measure different aspects of HPC system performance:
- LINPACK: The de-facto standard for measuring the floating-point computing power of a system. It evaluates how efficiently a system can solve a dense system of linear equations, typically measured in FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second).
- STREAM: Focuses on memory bandwidth and evaluates how well a system moves data between the processor and memory. Crucial for memory-bound applications.
- IOR (Interleaved or Random): Measures I/O performance, including read/write speeds to storage, especially important for data-intensive tasks.
- NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB): Evaluates parallel processing efficiency for both shared and distributed memory architectures.
- HPCC (HPC Challenge Benchmark): A comprehensive suite that includes tests for compute performance, memory bandwidth, network latency, and I/O performance, providing a more holistic view of system capabilities.
3. Benchmark Execution
Our experts will run these benchmarks in your HPC environment, capturing key performance data. Tests are conducted under both standard and stress conditions to understand how your system performs in real-world scenarios and under heavy workloads.
- Single-node vs. Multi-node Performance: We analyze how individual nodes perform and how the entire cluster behaves when running distributed tasks.
- Scalability Testing: We simulate increased workloads to assess how well the system scales, particularly across larger clusters.
- Hybrid Workloads: We also test hybrid workloads involving CPU and GPU computations, ensuring you get the best performance from both.
4. Detailed Reporting and Recommendations
Once the benchmarks are completed, we provide a comprehensive report detailing the performance results and key findings. Our report includes:
- Performance Metrics: A breakdown of performance across compute, memory, I/O, and network components, with comparisons to industry standards.
- Bottleneck Identification: Highlighting areas of inefficiency and recommendations for optimization.
- Optimization Suggestions: Tailored advice on how to improve performance, such as hardware upgrades, software tuning, network optimization, or workload balancing.
- Scalability Analysis: Insights into how well your current infrastructure scales and what upgrades or changes might be needed to improve capacity.
Key Performance Metrics We Focus On
- FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second): A measure of your system’s raw computational power.
- Memory Bandwidth: The rate at which data can be read from or written to memory.
- Latency: The time delay experienced in various parts of the system, particularly network and I/O operations.
- Throughput: The amount of data processed by the system over a given period.
- Scalability: How well the system can expand to handle larger workloads or more users.
Tailored Benchmarking for Specific Industries
We understand that each industry has unique computational needs, and our benchmarking services are tailored accordingly:
- Aerospace & Engineering: Benchmark simulations for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA).
- Healthcare & Bioinformatics: Evaluate HPC performance for large-scale genomics, molecular dynamics simulations, and imaging workloads.
- Finance & Trading: Assess systems for high-frequency trading algorithms, risk modeling, and real-time analytics.
- AI & Machine Learning: Optimize your HPC infrastructure for deep learning frameworks, large-scale AI model training, and inference workloads.
Why Choose Our HPC Benchmarking Services?
- Expert Knowledge: Our team of HPC professionals has years of experience optimizing high-performance systems across industries.
- Comprehensive Testing: We utilize a wide range of benchmarks to ensure every aspect of your HPC environment is evaluated.
- Actionable Insights: We don’t just provide performance data; we offer concrete recommendations to improve efficiency, scalability, and performance.
- Ongoing Support: We are available to assist with post-benchmarking optimization and re-testing to ensure continuous improvements.