Large system performance of SPEC OMP benchmark suites

Performance characteristics of application programs on large-scale systems are often significantly different from those on smaller systems. SPEC OMP includes benchmark suites intended for measuring performance of modern shared memory parallel systems. SPEC OMPM2001 is developed for medium-scale (4- to 16-way) systems whereas SPEC OMPL2001 is developed for large-scale systems (32-way and larger). We present our experiences on benchmark development in achieving good scalability using the OpenMP API. We also analyze the published results of these benchmark suites on large systems (32-way and larger), based on application program behavior and systems' architectural features.