BECAUSE European workshop Sophia-Antipolis (France) 14–16 October 1992. General presentation of the BECAUSE Benchmark Set: BBS

Within the framework of the ESPRIT Project named BECAUSE (5417), entitled “Benchmarking of Concurrent Architectures for their Use in Scientific Engineering”, a set of industrial benchmarks was specified. The BECAUSE Benchmark Set (BBS) is scientifically application oriented. The various Test Programs have been extracted and specified from real industrial software such as electromagnetics software, semi-conductor simulation and computational fluid dynamics. The aim was to provide a general tool to industry in order to evaluate new generations of parallel computers and supercomputers in terms of memory capacity and computational power. Before parallelising a complete application, a scientific developer must answer the questions: ‘What is the performance of a given machine on my application and is it worth spending time to parallelise it?’ The BBS has been designed to provide simple benchmarks, as close as possible to critical parts of real scientific applications. Thus, by implementing various tests selected within the BBS, the user can get information useful to answer these questions. The serial version of the entire set of BBS is public and available on a mail server.

In this paper, the objectives of the BECAUSE Project are recalled in order to replace the BBS in the context of this ESPRIT Project. Then, the applications from which test programs have been extracted are presented and all tests are described in detail. The next part is dedicated to the practical organisation of the BBS and is concerned with such aspects as documentation, input data and how to get the BBS, so that the BBS can be used inside and outside of the Project to assess parallel machines. As a conclusion, further developments are presented.