LINPACK benchmarks

The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's <a href="/facts/Floating-point_arithmetic/eIckahxe">floating-point</a> computing power. Introduced by <a href="/facts/Jack_Dongarra/xBWGdDT9">Jack Dongarra</a>, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense n × n <a href="/facts/System_of_linear_equations/fk9CFdgp">system of linear equations</a> Ax = b, which is a common task in <a href="/facts/Engineering/RFVg8H3I">engineering</a>.
The latest version of these <a href="/facts/Benchmark_(computing)/XSS42cRe">benchmarks</a> is used to build the <a href="/facts/TOP500/rz8zbyss">TOP500</a> list, ranking the world's most powerful supercomputers.
The aim is to approximate how fast a computer will perform when solving real problems. It is a simplification, since no single computational task can reflect the overall performance of a computer system. Nevertheless, the LINPACK benchmark performance can provide a good correction over the peak performance provided by the manufacturer. The peak performance is the maximal theoretical performance a computer can achieve, calculated as the machine's frequency, in cycles per second, times the number of operations per cycle it can perform. The actual performance will always be lower than the peak performance. The <a href="/facts/Computer_performance/td1qKox4">performance of a computer</a> is a complex issue that depends on many interconnected variables. The performance measured by the LINPACK benchmark consists of the number of <a href="/facts/64-bit_floating-point/JYyXXYFM">64-bit floating-point</a> operations, generally additions and multiplications, a computer can perform per second, also known as <a href="/facts/FLOPS/6zYlH68F">FLOPS</a>. However, a computer's performance when running actual applications is likely to be far behind the maximal performance it achieves running the appropriate LINPACK benchmark.
The name of these benchmarks comes from the <a href="/facts/LINPACK/2VtBJ2va">LINPACK</a> package, a collection of algebra <a href="/facts/Fortran/m1KqjcMU">Fortran</a> subroutines widely used in the 1980s, and initially tightly linked to the LINPACK benchmark. The LINPACK package has since been replaced by other libraries.

LINPACK benchmarks open-in-new

LINPACK benchmarks