By: Kevin Dean, Senior HPC & AI Performance Engineer Lenovo; Jimmy Cheng, Advisory Engineer, HW – Server Performance Engineer – Benchmarking, Lenovo; Ramesh Joginpalli, Business Development and Marketing Manager, HPC – CAE/CFD, Lenovo
Lenovo’s support of SPEC
As a leader in high performance computing, Lenovo continually supports the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmarks, that would help customers make better-informed decisions for their HPC workloads.
SPEChpc™ 2021 is a newly released benchmark suite from SPEC that produces industry-standard benchmarks for the newest generation of computer systems. What separates SPEChpc™ 2021 from SPEC CPU® 2017, SPEC MPI® 2007 or the other SPEC benchmark suites is that SPEChpc™ 2021 is one-of-a-kind benchmark suite which uses real-world applications that support “multiple programming models and offloading” to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art heterogenetic HPC systems.
The science and engineering codes within the suite are representative of HPC workloads and support strong scaling to hundreds of nodes by offering four suites: tiny, small, medium, and large, which increases the workloads for appropriate evaluation of HPC systems of different sizes. This is quite beneficial for enterprise customers to evaluate systems during procurement. Every application supports multiple programming models such at MPI, MPI+OpenACC, MPI+OpenMP®, and MPI+OpenMP® with target offload, which allows for evaluation on heterogenetic HPC systems and platforms.
Lenovo, a leader in supercomputing and HPC, understands the complexity of deploying HPC solutions that solve real world challenges as well as the complexity of evaluating HPC performance. With the increase of heterogenous HPC solutions, generalizing HPC performance has become an increasingly difficult task. But Lenovo’s HPC leadership along with the SPEC committee’s initiative of this new SPEChpc™ 2021 benchmark suite, these challenges have become easier and translates into tremendous confidence for customer’s evaluation of right sized HPC systems that best fits their workloads.
Powering SPEChpc™ 2021 Performance with Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers & AMD 3rd Generation EPYC™ Processors
Lenovo’s ThinkSystem servers SR645 and SR665 powered by AMD EPYC™ processors features massive CPU core density and memory footprint, that can help accelerate higher performance workloads and improve efficiency.
Figure 1. Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 (2U) configured to support two AMD 3rd Generation EPYC™ Processors
Lenovo has demonstrated excellent SPEChpc™ 2021 performance on Lenovo ThinkSystem HPC servers powered by the industry-leading performance of 3rd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors with AMD 3D V-Cache. Below is Lenovo’s SPEChpc™ 2021 published performance measured with Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 servers with two AMD EPYC™ 7773X CPUs.
Figure 2. Tiny (left) and Small (right) suites application measured normalized performance
Figure 3. Tiny (left) and Small (right) suites measured SPEChpc™ 2021 score performance
Performance highlights include:
- SPEChpc™ 2021 tiny and small suites scale very well up to four nodes or 512 cores
- Measurements display super-linear scaling for many of the applications, namely Tealeaf (physics), POT3D (solar physics) and miniWeather (weather). This leads to super-linear scaling for the overall scores which average 8% and 4% above the linear approximation for the tiny and small suites, respectfully, beyond a single node
- To maximize performance, each suite was run with eight OpenMP threads and 16 MPI tasks per server. The combination of MPI+OpenMP improved performance over a pure MPI execution
Lenovo and AMD
Lenovo and AMD are solving real world customer problems, creating new opportunities, thereby transforming the way we all live, learn, and work. Using data to dramatically accelerate organizations, improve their industries, and solve humanity’s greatest challenges with:
- End-to-end solutions and services at any scale
- Reliable technology to deliver real insights
- A trusted partner every step of the way
For more Information
For more information, explore Lenovo HPC solutions here.
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy efficiency for the newest generation of computing systems.
- SPEChpc™ 2021 Information
- SPEChpc™ 2021 Results
