Reduce for high-res timer Should be much larger than timer resolution. Most systems run out of decent-speed memory well before this. 32 Maximum number of processors to use in shared memory configuration. Adjust as necessary. For 18 processors, problems from 42k up to about 500k all have similar processing times in the 180-310 microsecond range.
Peak performance is reached for problems requiring about a millisecond.
As problem time increases to 10 milliseconds, performance decreases, and thereafter remains approximately constant until main memory runs out and disk swapping commences. At the longest problem times tested, the performance drop off with swapping is evident for the case of 18 processors and problem sizes of 200MB and larger. A plot of HINT performance by number of processors provides an indication of the losses due to network overhead and SMP operation with shared memory. We believe these data provide a great deal of insight into the performance capabilities and limitations of this equipment. Review of the HINT benchmark data on the above referenced site shows that the performance achieved per processor is greatly improved over supercomuters of about five years ago.