SPEC MPI2007 System Requirements

Last updated: October 21, 2009 jh/mc/jr/mvw/cp
(To check for possible updates to this document, please see http://www.spec.org/mpi2007/Docs/ )

SPEC MPI2007 is a source code benchmark suite that provides a comparative measure of MPI-parallel, floating point, compute intensive performance. Portability of that source code is one of the chief goals of SPEC MPI2007. SPEC has invested substantial effort to make the benchmarks portable across a wide variety of hardware architectures, operating systems, and compilers. During the development of SPEC MPI2007 testing was done on over many different hardware architectures and operating systems (mainly many variations of Unix and Linux). Most testing was done on 64 bit systems, and limited testing was done on 32 bit systems.

To run and install SPEC MPI2007, you will need:

A computer system running Windows, UNIX or Linux. The benchmark suite includes a toolset. Pre-compiled versions of the toolset are provided. The benchmark suite has been tested on the following systems:
- AIX: PowerPC systems running AIX 6 V6
- HP-UX: IPF running HP-UX 11iv2
- HP-UX: HP-UX 11iv2 on PA-RISC
- RHAS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 and 4
- RedHat: Fedora Core 3
- SLES: SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 and 10 on Linux systems
- Solaris: SPARC with Solaris 8 and later
- SuSE: 64-bit AMD64 Linux systems
For systems not listed in above, such as earlier or later versions of the above systems, you may find that the tools also work, but SPEC has not tested them. Please see the Portability Notes below.

In addition to the above list, there are several toolsets that are provided as a courtesy. These toolsets are expected to work, but have been tested much less extensively. More importantly, the benchmarks themselves have not been ported to these systems, so if you use one of them, you should be prepared to spend time on the porting effort. Please see the Portability Notes below.
- Irix: MIPS running IRIX
- Linux/PPC: PowerPC-based Linux systems with GLIBC 2.2.1+, built on YellowDog
- MacOS X: MacOS X 10.2.8+ on PowerPC G3+
- MacOS X: MacOS X 10.4.3+ on x86
- FreeBSD 5.4: x86, built with GCC 3.4.2
- FreeBSD 6.x: x86, built with GCC 3.4.4
- NetBSD 2.1: x86, built with GCC 3.3.3
- OpenBSD 3.8: x86, built with GCC 3.3.5
- Tru64: Alpha Tru64 UNIX V4.0F or later
- Solaris: x86 or x64 with Solaris 10 and later
- SGI ProPack 3
- Windows: Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
Windows systems that are not based on NT, such as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, will definitely NOT work.
A DVD drive.

Alternately, you can install MPI2007 from the compressed tar-file you can get from SPEC/HPG. You will need to verify that it is the Version 2.0 delivery and not some intermediate test kit. Also, the the file space calculations below assume that this file has been deleted once the MPI2007 directory tree is installed.
Memory: typically 1 GB per rank for the medium suite and 2 GB per rank for the large suite. This does not consider OS overhead so more may be required:
- The MPI2007 medium benchmarks (code + workload) have been designed to fit within about 1 GB of physical memory per rank. The minimum officially supported memory size is 16 GB. This means that an 8 rank run could require more than 1 GB per rank.
- The MPI2007 large benchmarks (code + workload) have been designed to fit within about 2 GB of physical memory per rank. The minimum oficially supported rank count is 64, implying a minimum limit of 128 GB of memory.
- The 1 or 2 GB per rank of RAM for the benchmarks does not include space needed for the operating system and other non-SPEC tasks on the system under test.
- Attempting to run the suite with insufficient memory is strongly discouraged, as you will end up measuring the speed of your paging file, not the speed of your system running compute intensive workloads.
Disk space:
- The disk space requirement will depend on the suite you are running and can vary greatly depending upon your usage and the system you run on:
  - About 10 GB are required to run the medium suite.
  - About 17 GB are required to run the large suite on a Big Endian system.
  - About 24 GB are required to run the large suite on a Little Endian system.
  These estimates are based on the following:
  1. Unpacked and installed, the suite takes approximately 7 GB of disk space.
  2. When compiling your own binaries, the size of the build directories and resulting objects will vary depending upon your system, compiler, and compiler options. Estimate at least 500 MB of disk space per build. If you plan to maintain multiple sets of binaries, each set will need space.
  3. Each single run (using binaries you have built, or using pre built binaries from a separate source) makes a copy of the data set, so 2 GB of additional disk space are required for the medium suite. On Little Endian systems, the 147.l2wrf2 benchmark needs to convert its input set, so the large suite requires 15 GB of additional disk space, while only 9 GB of additional disk space are required for Big Endian systems.
- Minimum requirement: It is possible to run with less disk space if: you delete the build directories after the build is done; and you clean run directories between tests. See the discussion of disk space in runspec.html for more information about managing disk space.
Note: links to SPEC MPI2007 documents on this web page assume that you are reading the page from a directory that also contains the other SPEC MPI2007 documents. If by some chance you are reading this web page from a location where the links do not work, try accessing the referenced documents at one of the following locations:
- www.spec.org/mpi2007/Docs/
- The $SPEC/Docs/ directory on a system where SPEC MPI2007 has been installed.
- The Docs/directory on your SPEC MPI2007 distribution DVD.
Since SPEC supplies only source code for the benchmarks, you will need either:
1. A set of compilers and run-time libraries for the result(s) you intend to measure:
  - Fortran 95 or later
  - C99
  - C++98
  - MPI library
  - other run-time libraries that may be required
  --or--
2. A pre-compiled set of benchmark executables, given to you by another user of the same revision of SPEC MPI2007, and any run-time libraries that may be required for those executables, including an MPI library, provided they are all compatible with your system configuration.
Please notice that you cannot generate a valid MPI2007 result unless you meet all of requirement 5.a or 5.b. For example, if you are attempting to build the suite but lack a Fortran 95 compiler, you will not be able to measure a SPECmpiM_base2007 result.

Portability Notes

Despite SPEC's testing efforts, certain portability problems are likely to arise from time to time. For example:

Some platforms may not have a Fortran 95 compiler available.
Some older compilers may not include all the features needed to run the entire suite.
Sometimes, a new release of a compiler or operating system may introduce new behavior that is incompatible with one of the benchmarks.

If you visit http://www.spec.org/mpi2007/ and look up results for SPEC MPI2007, you will find combinations of OS and compiler versions that are known to work. For example, if a vendor reports a SPECmpiM_base2007 result on the SuperHero 4 using SuperHero Unix V4.0 with SuperHero Fortran v4.0, SuperHero C V4.0 and SuperHero C++ V4.0, you may take that as an assertion by the vendor that the listed versions of Unix, Fortran, C, and C++ will successfully compile and run the SPEC MPI2007 suite on the listed machine.

For systems that have not (yet) been reported by vendors, SPEC can provide limited technical support to resolve portability issues. See techsupport.html for information.