A CAREFUL INTERPRETATION OF SIMPLE KERNEL BENCHMARKS YIELDS THE ESSENTIAL INFORMATION ABOUT A PARALLEL SUPERCOMPUTER

The vector triad is identified as the typical operation for the soluti on of engineering problems. Measurements for this operation on eight d ifferent processors of parallel computers are presented and discussed. The communication parameters of six parallel computers, including a w orkstation cluster are presented and scaled such that the correspondin g ''lost operations'' are visible. Two computer experiments for latenc y hiding are executed with a disappointing result. We believe that sim ple kernel benchmarks are better for the measurement of parallel compu ters than real-life codes because the latter may reveil more about the quality of one's software than about the properties of the measured c omputer.