Let’s HPC (www.letshpc.org) is a platform for high-performance computing (HPC) users, especially HPC students, to efficiently and effectively compare different algorithms with different parameters. Users first write a program to solve a particular problem in either message passing interface (MPI) (for distributed environments) or OpenMP (for multicore environments). The presenetd web interface allows users to specify a set of parameters about the program being submitted. The platform then executes the submitted program multiple times to produce statistically significant results to compare with the chosen benchmark data. The platform then provides the user with reports of various forms, including graphs. The report contains an array of extensive data such as execution time, speedup, cache performance, page faults, translation lookaside buffer (TLB) statistics, and so on.

Students and researchers can use this platform to compare their solutions (program and algorithm) to known benchmarks, without the extra hassle of collecting data, measuring results, and plotting graphs. Compared to other available tools, this platform uses a holistic approach that takes a user program and produces a set of comprehensive performance results.

The authors have used this set of tools in an upper-level undergraduate computer science course. They surveyed the students twice, once early in the semester and again at the end of the semester. The survey results show that the tools are effective and efficient. Researchers can also use the toolset to compare results with known algorithms on a particular hardware and software configuration. Note that the paper lacks a summary or discussion of the benchmark data, which would be helpful for readers.