Newsgroups: comp.parallel,comp.parallel.pvm,comp.benchmarks
From: igl@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Ian Glendinning)
Subject: Announcing GENESIS Benchmarks, Release 3.0
Organization: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 15:46:20 GMT
Message-ID: <Ctv558.8xK@dcs.ed.ac.uk>


              Announcing Release 3.0 the GENESIS Benchmark Suite

The University of Southampton HPC Centre is pleased to announce release 3.0
of the GENESIS distributed memory benchmark suite, which has been developed
to fulfil a need for evaluating the performance of distributed memory MIMD
systems on scientific and engineering applications.  The benchmarks were
written within ESPRIT project P2702 (GENESIS), by a number of the project
partners, and were prepared for public release by Southampton Novel
Architecture Research Centre.  Further development and distribution of the
suite is now being performed by the High Performance Computing Centre at
Southampton.

Most of the benchmarks are message-passing codes written in Fortran 77,
using mainly double precision arithmetic.  There are two different versions
of each message-passing code, one using the PARMACS 5.1 message passing macros
and the other using PVM 3.x.  There are also data parallel versions of some
of the codes, written in High Performance Fortran (HPF), and sequential
versions where applicable.

The benchmarks are divided into three categories according to their level
of complexity/realism as follows:

1. Low-level Codes measure basic machine parameters connected with
   communication, synchronization and vectorization.

2. Application Kernels are larger, more complex codes that represent
   the computationally intensive kernels in common to a variety of
   different application.  Analysis of their performance is generally
   possible in terms of the basic machine parameters.

3. Compact Applications are typical of medium-sized research codes,
   where effects due to non-parallelizable sections of code, and memory
   or I/O bottlenecks may become important.

This release features PVM 3.x versions of all the low-level and kernel
message-passing benchmarks, in addition to the existing codes using the
PARMACS 5.1 message-passing macros.  The low-level benchmarks now mirror
those available from the PARKBENCH (PARallel Kernels and BENCHmarks)
repository at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and include four new codes,
COMMS3, POLY1, POLY2 and POLY3.  The QCD2 kernel has also been replaced
by SOLVER from the PARKBENCH suite.

The source code for the GENESIS benchmark suite, and some related papers are
available from the GENESIS Benchmark Information Service (GBIS), which is
hosted by par.soton.ac.uk (152.78.128.5).  It can currently be accessed in
four ways:

1. World Wide Web - A page of information about the GENESIS benchmark suite,
   containing links to the release directory, is available with URL:

      hhtp://hpcc.soton.ac.uk/software/genesis.html

   Other local information may be obtained by following links from our home
   page, with URL:

      http://hpcc.soton.ac.uk/

2. Anonymous ftp - ftp to par.soton.ac.uk with username "anonymous", and
   look in the directory pub/genesis.

3. xnetlib - an X-based interface.  The xnetlib client software is available
   from the netlib server at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  You can find out
   how to retrieve it by sending the message "send index from xnetlib" to
   netlib@ornl.gov in a message with a blank subject line.  When you have the
   xnetlib client program installed on your system you must first use the "New
   Server Entry" option from the "Setup" screen to add par.soton.ac.uk to the
   list of available servers.  The site will then become available as an
   option to the "Index" and "Timely Message" pull down menus, and its top
   level directories will be added to the list displayed by the "Library"
   option.  Currently there is one such directory, called genesis.

4. netlib - an e-mail interface. Requests should be sent in the body of a
   message addressed to "netlib@par.soton.ac.uk", with a blank subject line.
   The request "send index" will give you a top level index of what is
   available, together with an explanation of the requests that netlib
   understands.

The next relese of the benchmark suite will be a minor revision to correct
a number of known bugs, mainly of the type that only manifest themselves on
some systems.  Later in 1994 we hope to release MPI versions of the low-level
and kernel benchmarks.

We would also be happy to answer any questions you might have, which you
should address to support@par.soton.ac.uk.

   Regards,
    Ian Glendinning
--
Ian Glendinning            HPC Centre, Computing Services
igl@par.soton.ac.uk        University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Tel: +44 703 592594        WWW URL: http://hpcc.soton.ac.uk/staff/igl.html



