Speaker
Description
The transition to the HL-LHC era brings unprecedented computing demands and a rapidly shifting hardware landscape. Since its successful deployment in 2023, HEPScore has become the standard CPU benchmark for WLCG sites, replacing the legacy HEP-SPEC06. The journey to HEPScore was a major collaborative effort, involving software developers, data analysts, site personel, and the WLCG Deployment Task Force, to create a representative benchmark based entirely on real-world HEP applications.
Today, as GPU applications and GPU availability over the Grid rise, the community requires a comparable standard to measure raw performance and assess the cost-benefit ratio of GPU resources. Building on the proven methodology of HEPScore23, the HEPiX Benchmarking Working Group is intensifying the development of a GPU equivalent, again utilizing representative HEP GPU workloads as payloads.
This next phase introduces complex new challenges, including heterogeneous architectures, strong workload-specific optimizations, and a fast-evolving hardware and software ecosystem. This contribution reviews the collaborative journey and technological solutions that made CPU HEPScore23 a reality, analyzes the novel challenges of GPU standardization, and presents our strategy and current development status for establishing a robust GPU benchmark for the WLCG.