CactusADM - part of the SPEC CPU2006
The SPEC computer-benchmarking consortium has released the 2006 edition of their widely used performance benchmarking suite: SPEC CPU 2006. (see the official release).
This includes 12 integer (CINT2006) and 17 floating-point (CFP2006) benchmarks, together with standard ways of combining their benchmark results into single integer and floating-point performance indices.
CactusADM was tested on different platforms and found to be relevant and suitable for one of the 17 CPU-intensive benchmarks. CactusADM benchmark was prepared by Malcom Tobias from Center for Computational Biology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis and is based on the BenchADM benchmark that was used as a core Cactus benchmark for many years.
SPEC is known as probably the most widely used benchmark in the computer industry for evaluating the performance of processors and compilers.
In particular, compiler developers put a lot of effort into tuning compilers to work well on the SPEC benchmark, so having Cactus in the SPEC suite should lead to compilers doing a better job on our code.
With this release, CactusADM benchmark joins application benchmarks from other intensive scientific applications in different fields, such as GAMESS, ZEUS, WRF, GROMACS and NAMD.