Where can I find missed hpccinf.txt for hpcc?

Question

I have installed hpcc package to benchmark my system. Its description is as follows:

Description-en: HPC Challenge benchmark
The High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge benchmark runs a suite of 7 tests that measure the performance of CPU, memory and network for HPC clusters. Amongst others, it includes the High-Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark, used by the Top500 ranking (http://www.top500.org/).

It has executable named hpcc and placed in /usr/bin/hpcc.

If I run it - I get error message:

$ hpcc 
HPL WARNING from process # 0, on line 313 of function HPL_pdinfo:
>>> cannot open file hpccinf.txt <<<

How to correctly run hpcc and where can I get hpccinf.txt file?

Answer 1

According to man hpcc

The High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge benchmark runs a suite of tests that measure the performance of CPU, memory and network for HPC clusters. hpcc takes its parameters from a hpccinf.txt file. An example can be found in /usr/share/doc/hpcc/examples/_hpccinf.txt.

So we need to copy /usr/share/doc/hpcc/examples/_hpccinf.txt to current directory with name hpccinf.txt, edit it and run it with mpirun.openmpi hpcc as described in /usr/share/doc/hpcc/README.Debian:

HPC Challenge Benchmark for Debian

Please read /usr/share/doc/hpcc/README.txt.gz, especially section 'Runtime configuration'.

An hpccinf.txt input file is provided as /usr/share/doc/hpcc/examples/_hpccinf.txt. Copy it into your current dir, tune it and launch hpcc using mpirun.openmpi: $ mpirun.openmpi hpcc

-- Lucas Nussbaum Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:04:17 +0200

So we have two options:

• use default hpccinf.txt from repository and run benchmark

  cp /usr/share/doc/hpcc/examples/_hpccinf.txt hpccinf.txt
  mpirun.openmpi -np $(nproc) hpcc
  

  The results will be saved in hpccoutf.txt file.

• customize hpccinf.txt for modern systems with 4-8 cores (solving matrix with 10000x10000 dimmensions):

  cat << EOF > hpccinf.txt
  HPLinpack benchmark input file
  Innovative Computing Laboratory, University of Tennessee
  HPL.out      output file name (if any)
  6            device out (6=stdout,7=stderr,file)
  1            # of problems sizes (N)
  10000        Ns
  1            # of NBs
  128          NBs
  0            PMAP process mapping (0=Row-,1=Column-major)
  1            # of process grids (P x Q)
  1            Ps
  1            Qs
  16.0         threshold
  1            # of panel fact
  2            PFACTs (0=left, 1=Crout, 2=Right)
  1            # of recursive stopping criterium
  4            NBMINs (>= 1)
  1            # of panels in recursion
  2            NDIVs
  1            # of recursive panel fact.
  1            RFACTs (0=left, 1=Crout, 2=Right)
  1            # of broadcast
  1            BCASTs (0=1rg,1=1rM,2=2rg,3=2rM,4=Lng,5=LnM)
  1            # of lookahead depth
  1            DEPTHs (>=0)
  0            SWAP (0=bin-exch,1=long,2=mix)
  1            swapping threshold
  1            L1 in (0=transposed,1=no-transposed) form
  1            U  in (0=transposed,1=no-transposed) form
  0            Equilibration (0=no,1=yes)
  8            memory alignment in double (> 0)
  EOF
  

  Then run benchmark and interpret the results

  mpirun.openmpi -np $(nproc) hpcc && grep Gflops$ -A3 hpccoutf.txt
  

  Examples for 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS:

  +------------------------+---------|-----------+----|----|
  |       CPU              | Threads |  Gflops   | Ps | Qs |
  +------------------------+---------+-----------|----+----+
  | Intel i7-740QM         |    8    |    16.4   |  1 |  1 |
  | Intel i7-920           |    8    |    28.1   |  2 |  2 |
  | Intel i7-4790          |    8    |   137.1   |  1 |  1 |
  | Intel i7-3537U         |    4    |    14.3   |  2 |  2 |
  | AMD A4-4000            |    2    |     6.6   |  2 |  1 |
  | Intel Core 2 Duo E8300 |    2    |    16.2   |  2 |  1 |
  | Intel Pentium G3420    |    2    |    26.1   |  2 |  1 |
  | Raspberry Pi 3B+       |    4    |     1.9   |  1 |  1 |
  +------------------------+---------+-----------|----+----+
  

Note: if have Intel you can use also their optimized LINPACK benchmark. Its results is +25% higher.