HPC systems are built with innovative system architectures and novel programming models to further push the speed limit of computing. The increased complexity
poses challenges for performance portability and performance evaluation. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) has a long history of producing industry-standard benchmarks for modern computer systems. SPEC’s newly released
SPEChpc 2021 benchmark suites, developed by the High Performance Group, are a bold attempt to provide a fair and objective benchmarking tool designed for state-of-the-art HPC systems. With the support of multiple host and accelerator programming
models, the suites are portable across both homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures. Different workloads are developed to fit system sizes ranging from a few compute nodes to a few hundred compute nodes. In this manuscript, we take a first glance at these benchmark suites and evaluate their portability and basic performance characteristics on various popular and emerging HPC architectures, including x86 CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and AMD GPU. This study provides a first-hand experience of executing
the SPEChpc 2021 suites at scale on production HPC systems, discusses real-world use cases, and serves as an initial guideline for using the benchmark suites.