Hierarchical INTegration
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Hierarchical INTegration, or HINT for short, is a computer
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that ranks a computer system as a whole (i.e. the entire computer instead of individual components). It measures the full range of performance, mostly based on the amount of work a computer can perform over time. A system with a very fast processor would likely be rated poorly if the
buses A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a motor vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van, but fewer than the average rail transport. It is most commonly used ...
were very poor compared to those of another system that had both an average processor and average buses. For example, in the past,
Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...
computers with relatively slow processor speeds (800 MHz) used to perform better than
x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...
based systems with processors running at nearly 2 GHz. HINT is known for being almost immune to artificial optimization and can be used by many computers ranging from a calculator to a supercomputer. It was developed at the
U.S. Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear we ...
's
Ames Laboratory Ames National Laboratory, formerly Ames Laboratory, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Ames, Iowa, and affiliated with Iowa State University. It is a top-level national laboratory for research on national sec ...
and is licensed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...
. HINT is intended to be "scalable" to run on any size computer, from small serial systems to highly parallel supercomputers. The person using the HINT benchmark can use any floating-point or integer type. HINT benchmark results have been published comparing a variety of parallel and uniprocessor systems. A related tool ANALYTIC HINT can be used as a design tool to estimate the benefits of using more memory, a faster processor, or improved communications (bus speed) within the system.


See also

* John Gustafson (scientist)


References


External links


official site

article discussing HINT benchmark

benchmark sources download

benchmark sources download
{{compu-hardware-stub Benchmarks (computing)