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From: khb%chiba@Sun.COM (chiba)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: SPEC Bench-a-Thon
Keywords: SPEC performance benchmarks systems
Message-ID: <113316@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 30 Jun 89 04:54:47 GMT
References: <22031@abbott.mips.COM> <22033@abbott.mips.COM> <4714@ficc.uu.net> <112809@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <4828@ficc.uu.net>
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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In article <4828@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
...life as a benchmark ...>
>> Why would this be an interesting benchmark ?
>
>It's simple to implement in different architectures and languages, and it
>is a reasonably good test of massively parallel processing. For example,
>with a connection machine running 64k processors, you could keep all
>of them busy with a 256 by 256 LIFE matrix.

Which seems very artifical to me. I have played with hypercubes and
such, and while they hold great promise, very few application codes START
OUT being massively parallel (Geof. Fox and friends to the contrary).
If someone wants to submit a lattice gague code as a benchmark that
would represent sensible work. Life is tiny bit twiddeling in
parallel, and that is very rare ... so it should not IMHO be part of SPEC.

>> The goal of any sensible
>> benchmark suite is to select codes which closely resemble real work
>
>For certain environments, that resembles real work.

Could you be more specific ?



Keith H. Bierman      |*My thoughts are my own. Only my work belongs to Sun*
It's Not My Fault     |	Marketing Technical Specialist    ! kbierman@sun.com
I Voted for Bill &    |   Languages and Performance Tools. 
Opus  (* strange as it may seem, I do more engineering now     *)