Benchmarking and Profiling With Cactus Applications

Cactus applications have been widely used for benchmarking for machine procurement and testing, for understanding performance characteristics, and for profiling and optimization studies. The Cactus Team regularly run the benchmarks on this page with different architectures, compilers, MPI implementations etc. More details about publications and reports resulting from this work can be found on our publications page. Sasanka Madiraju's master thesis presents the performance of Cactus benchmarks on different machines and architectures. A 2005 report to NSF describes why Cactus provides a good benchmarking platform. Also see the News: CactusADM is now part of the 2006 edition of the SPEC benchmark suite.

To read a description of the significance and profile of BSSN_PUGH, along with performance and scaling results with various architectures, see "A Scientific Application Benchmark using the Cactus Framework"

Standard Benchmarks

We currently maintain five standard benchmarking applications:

Each tarball contains a Cactus source tree with just the thorns necessary to run the benchmark.

We have combined the above tarballs into one: Cactus.tar.gz. The same source code (but without the benchmarking parameter files and thorn lists) is available from our CVS repositories with the tag benchmark_20051007.

• Downloading and building the benchmark tarballs
• Benchmark database

Pre-2004 Benchmarks

We also maintain a number of results on our old site. The following link has previous results from for a number of different benchmarks and target architectures.

• Pre-2004 benchmarks