LINPACK Benchmark

Definition

The LINPACK benchmark is a computer benchmark that reports the performance for solving a system of linear equations with a general dense matrix of size 100, 1,000, and also of arbitrary size. The matrices, the calculations, and the solution must use 64-bit floating point arithmetic, and partial pivoting needs to be used for numerical stability. The allowed parallelism modes include automatic parallelization done by the compiler as well as manual parallelization that uses hardware-assisted shared memory or explicit message passing on a distributed memory machine.

Discussion

The original LINPACK Benchmark is, in some sense, an accident. It was originally designed to assist users of the LINPACK package [1] by providing information on execution times required to solve a system of linear equations. The first “LINPACK Benchmark” report appeared as an appendix in the LINPACK Users’ Guide in 1979. The appendix comprised data for one commonly used path in the LINPACK software...