Benchmarking for Performance Portable Applications

In collaboration with University College, London and the University of Reading, we are building a Benchmarking Framework to enable reproducible benchmarking of ExCALIBUR applications. The framework will make it easy to repeatably and reliably run a benchmark across diverse computer architectures, and assist with the analysis of the performance portability properties. The framework will build on existing technologies to build applications (Spack) and reproducibly run them on clusters (ReFrame). As such, it will be simple for other applications to adopt the methodology outlined in our Benchmarking Framework.

This ExCALIBUR Benchmarking project will collate benchmarks, Spack package building recipes and ReFrame run scripts together into a suite relevant to ExCALIBUR. We will demonstrate the Benchmark Framework running a number of benchmarks relevant to ExCALIBUR across the UK’s National supercomputing capabilities, including ARCHER2, the Tier-2 systems, and Test Bed systems enabled by ExCALIBUR Hardware and Enabling Software. The project will enable post-processing of the benchmarking data to gain understanding in the performance portability of the applications, in particular calculating performance portability metrics and producing appropriate visualisations and graphs.

This project has been funded by EPSRC under ExCALIBUR Hardware and Enabling Software.

More details about this Project are available on the ExCALIBUR website.