The project has been co-sponsored by the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems program, the United States Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
The HPC Challenge Benchmark is an effort to improve visibility into this multidimensional space by combining the measurement of several of these attributes into a single program.
Due to this assumption of a hierarchical system structure most of the tests are run in several different modes of operation.
Following the notation used by the benchmark reports, results labeled "single" mean that the test was run on one randomly chosen processor in the system, results labeled "star" mean that an independent copy of the test was run concurrently on each processor in the system, and results labeled "global" mean that all the processors were working in coordination to solve a single problem (with data distributed across the nodes of the system).
The benchmark currently consists of 7 tests (with the modes of operation indicated for each): At a high level, the tests are intended to provide coverage of four important attributes of performance: double-precision floating-point arithmetic (DGEMM and HPL), local memory bandwidth (STREAM), network bandwidth for "large" messages (PTRANS, RandomAccess, FFT, b_eff), and network bandwidth for "small" messages (RandomAccess, b_eff).