RunningSPEC

First off: some steps can only be copleted successfully by David Groep, since he owns the licenses needed for ICC and SmartHeap. There is only one Intel license (commercial) available for doing this, and these is also only a single SmartHeap license (on order). Any other Nikhef NDPF user can run the SPEC benchmark with the plain old and dirty gcc compiler and broken heap management.

Prepare the machine

• Install a machine with CentOS5 x86-64, e.g. via quattor or manually. Make sure it's a physical machine, and that it will be dedicated to the benchmark running for at least as long as you need it. Make sure numactl and taskset (from util-linux) are available on the machine.

Using the Intel compiler

If you want to get proper performace from the benchmark, and for vendor acceptance tests, you must use the Intel compiler:

• As root, install the Intel compiler suite (version 11.0) from [https://www.nikhef.nl/grid/ndpf/files/local/intel/]. Install both the i386 and the x86_64 varieties.
• As root, run the script [intel-Compiler-postinstall.sh] to set the installation destination into the generated scripts.
• As root, install the license file to /opt/intel/licenses/icc-davidg.lic and chown it to davidg:users, mode 0600.
• Add to your profile:

PATH=$PATH:/opt/intel/Compiler/11.0/081/bin/intel64/
export PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/intel/Compiler/11.0/081/lib/intel64
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
LANG=C
export LANG

Installing SPEC2006

• From the installation directory retrieve the SPEC2006 sources [cpu2006.tar.bz2] (you'll need your NDPF user account data to retrieve the file, and be a member of the systemAdministrators group: for SPEC2006 and SPEC2000 Nikhef has a site license).

• Unpack the spec2006 sources in a dedicated directory (to prevent pollution):

mkdir -p benchmarking && ( cd benchmarking ; bzcat ../cpu2006.tar.bz2 | tar xf - )

• change to the benchmark directory

cd benchmarking

• copy the proper configuration file from the private repository, e.g.

 https://www.nikhef.nl/grid/ndpf/files/nikhef-only/spec2006-nikhef/config/cpu2006-icc11-noSH-rate-nikhef-ppfB0.cfg
 for a configuration without SmartHeap but assuming some special stack settings in the notes.

• set the SMP affinity in the config file to the number of available cores. This directly affect the rate measurement!

• Set the environment correctly by SOURCING the [setstack.sh] script:

 export KMP_STACK_SIZE=64M
 ulimit -s unlimited