Running HS06

Running the HEPSPEC-06 benchmark

This article describes the steps that were taken to run the HEPSPEC-06 benchmark on the worker nodes at Nikhef. The procedure is in principle described on the CERN wiki [1] and some additional information can be found at EGI [2]. However, some modifications were needed to get the benchmark to run.

Procedure

1. Create the base directory for the test

 SPEC=/tmp/benchmark
 mkdir $SPEC

2. Get the benchmark configuration file [3] and extract it in the base directory

 cd $SPEC
 tar xzvf spec2k6-2.13.tar.gz

3. Overwrite runspec.sh with this version [4]

4. Get the SPEC2006 test suite. If you got an NDPF account, you can get cpu2006.tar.bz2. Extract the file

 tar jzvf /tmp/cpu2006.tar.bz2

5. Prepare a result directory:

 mkdir myresults

6. To run the test, start a screen session and start the benchmark in it:

 screen
 ./runspec.sh -f myresults -a 32 -d "mynode CentOS 5.9 x86_64 HS06"

7. Wait until the test completed (this may take 4 hours or more, depending on the hardware). The results appear in the parent directory:

 cd ..
 head spec2k6-wn-car-019-20130411-111830/system.txt
 SPECall_cpp2006 with 32-bit binaries.
 Description: wn-car CentOS 5.9 x86_64 HS06
 Result: 142.88
 Start time: Thu Apr 11 11:18:30 CEST 2013
 End time:   Thu Apr 11 15:21:38 CEST 2013

 Kernel: Linux wn-car-019.farm.nikhef.nl 2.6.18-348.3.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon Mar 11 19:39:25 EDT   2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
 Processors: 12  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5645  @ 2.40GHz
 Memory: 49447624 kB
 GCC: gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-54)

For this node, the rating is 142.88 for 12 cores.