Parallel Performance Project Research Paper

Research Paper

Characterizing Shared-Memory Applications: A Case Study of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks
Gheith A. Abandah
Technical Report HPL-97-24, HP Laboratories, Jan 1997.

Abstract

The objective of this report is to present our characterization of a shared-memory implementation of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB). This characterization is needed to support the design decisions of future shared-memory multiprocessors. This report presents two sets of characterization data; the first set is the application characteristics that do not change from one hardware configuration to another, and the second set is the traffic characteristics of the application when run on a possible future hardware configuration. The data presented in this report include characterization of NPB communication, sharing, and cache behavior.