Intel® MPI Benchmarks User Guide and Methodology Description

# Introducing Intel® MPI Benchmarks

Intel® MPI Benchmarks performs a set of MPI performance measurements for point-to-point and global communication operations for a range of message sizes. Intel® MPI Benchmarks is developed using ANSI C plus standard MPI. It is distributed as an open source project to enable use of benchmarks across various cluster architectures and MPI implementations.

The generated benchmark data fully characterizes:

- Performance of a cluster system, including node performance, network latency, and throughput
- Efficiency of the MPI implementation used

The Intel® MPI Benchmarks package consists of the following components:

- IMB-MPI1 – benchmarks for MPI-1 functions.

- Two components for MPI-2 functionality:

- - IMB-EXT – one-sided communications benchmarks.

  - IMB-IO – input/output (I/O) benchmarks.

- Two components for MPI-3 functionality:

- - IMB-NBC – benchmarks for non-blocking collective (NBC) operations.

  - IMB-RMA – one-sided communications benchmarks. These benchmarks measure the Remote Memory Access (RMA) functionality introduced in the MPI-3 standard.

Each component constitutes a separate executable file. You can run all of the supported benchmarks, or specify a single executable file in the command line to get results for a specific subset of benchmarks.

If you do not have the MPI-2 or MPI-3 extensions available, you can install and use IMB-MPI1 that uses only standard MPI-1 functions.