Credits for SPEC ACCEL

(To check for possible updates to this document, please see http://www.spec.org/accel/Docs/ )

Creating a suite of source code benchmarks to provide a consistent, comparative measure of OpenCL, OpenACC, OpenMP and compute-intensive performance is not simple. The challenges are numerous, for example:

locating meaningful programs;
ensuring that they port to numerous environments;
defining rules to govern how the programs are compiled, run and reported;
developing a toolset to help enforce these rules while still making things easy to use; and
defining a process by which decisions can be made amongst the group working on the project.

And in the end, you hope you have something that is fair, relevant, and understandable, that will address technology for a period of years.

Such is the case with SPEC ACCEL, which is a new benchmark. The new benchmark suite:

Provides a variety of applications and application areas included in the suite.
Uses application source code that is significantly complex.
Tests programming models for OpenACC, OpenCL and OpenMP.
Improves the tools for running and using the suite compared with previous HPG benchmarks.
Defines the run rules.
Provides documentation.

All of this is due to the efforts of a large team of people from around the world, that SPEC would like to thank (with apologies and thanks to those who may not be listed).

Program Authors and Contributors

SPEC ACCEL benchmarks are based on real-world applications and tests. We therefore thank the authors of those codes.

All the benchmarks in the final OpenCL suite come from PARBOIL (Prof Wen-Mei Hwu's research group at UIUC) and RODINIA (Prof Kevin Skadron's research group at UVA). To these research teams we are very thankful.

For more information regarding the SPEC benchmarks, including information about other contributors, see the documentation in the individual benchmarks directories.

SPEC

We would also like to thank:

SPEC management, who provided us with resources, and kept the SPEC HPG Subcommittee on their toes:
- David Reiner - President, SPEC
- Walter Bays - Previous President, presided over 12 years of growth
- Kaivalya Dixit - Long-time President, and Guiding Light of SPEC
- Steve Realmuto - Treasurer, SPEC
The SPEC office, who were the ones who really provided us with the resources:
- Dianne Rice - Administration
- Cathy Sandifer, Jason Glick - Webmasters
- Bob Cramblitt - Press Relations
The long time SPEC HPG leaders, who initiated this benchmark and successfully carried it to version 1.0 and 1.1.
- Kalyan Kumaran, previous Chair
- Matthias Müller, previous Vice-Chair

Benchmark Project Leaders and Developers

Most importantly, thank you to the people who sweated through technical details and porting issues, debated their view points vigorously, and were willing to drive issues to conclusion. Without these people this benchmark suite would truly not exist.

A benchmark "Project Leader" serves as the focal point for porting a program to all the tested platforms, improves the stability of the code, removes code that SPEC does not want to test (such as platform-specific extensions), writes documentation, consults with both the author and the users, and generally tries to give each benchmark its best chance at making it through SPEC's testing process. Thank you to these project leaders:

Sunita Chandrasekaran, Shuai Che, Mathew Colgrove, Alexander Grund, Arpith Jacob, John Stratton, Ke Wang, each of whom served as the SPEC "Project Leader" for one or more of the benchmark candidates that was evaluated by SPEC.

Thank you also to the following people who worked very closely with the project leaders:

Guido Juckeland and Bo Wang, who are responsible for all the results on the reference machines.
Alexander Grund, who worked on implementing all the peak optimizations in the OpenCL suite.
Brian Whitney, who served as productive Toolsmaster.

In addition to the above, many other people from the member companies assisted with benchmark development, including but not limited to Alexander Bobyr, Bill Brantley, Huiyu Feng, Oscar Hernandez, Wayne Joubert, Huian Li, Junjie Li, Daniel Neilson, Maxim Perminov, Dave Raddatz, Pavel Shelepugin, Alexy Titov, Veronica Vergara Larrea, Matthis van Waveren, Sandra Wienke, Rengan Xu.

Analysis, and Tools

Analysis of the candidate benchmarks was a substantial task. Contributors to profiling and other forms of analysis included: John Stratton, Ke Wang, Brian Whilney, Sandra Wienke.

Cloyce Spradling is the primary author of the SPEC CPU/HPG toolset.

Behind the scenes

Finally, we thank all of the people behind the scenes in the compiler groups, architecture groups and performance groups who supported their work for SPEC at their respective companies.

The Bottom Line

Thank you!

Brian Whitney, Release Manager, SPEC HPG Committee
Junjie Li, Secretary, SPEC HPG Committee
Guido Juckeland, Vice-Chair, SPEC HPG Committee
Robert Henschel, Chair, SPEC HPG Committee