The Linpack Benchmark

The Linpack benchmark measures the floating point rate of execution for solving a linear system of equations. This benchmark is used to determine the number of Floating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS) a super-computer can achieve. Results are published periodically via the Top500 list (http://www.top500.org).

HPC Benchmarks and Cluster Tools

The HPC Challenge Benchmark suite including the Linpack application are often used elements of a High Performance Computing performance profiling toolkit. Many such benchmark applications and cluster profiling tools were originally developed on non-Microsoft platforms and thus may require some rebuilding for Windows. Often, the rebuild effort is very easy. This is the case with Linpack. We've made it even easier by providing a Windows specific makefile. Simply download the resource file via the 'Downloads' tab and follow the instructions therein. Note that an automated benchmarking tool will soon be available via the Windows HPC Server 2008 tool-pack.

• HPC Challenge Benchmarks (http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/)
• Windows HPC Community, Performance Blog (http://windowshpc.net/Blogs/performance/default.aspx)
• Windows HPC on MSDN Code Gallery (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/hpc)

Instructions

Please see the detailed instructions for building the Linpack application within the resource file "PortLinpack.zip" via the "Downloads" section of this project (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/How2BuildLinpack/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx).