Superfast and highly scalable Lizard

image This little animal helps you answering one of the most important question after installing Windows HPC Server 2008. Is this thing working? To find out if and how well it is working, Microsoft sent you this little critter.

Lizard - Lizard helps you to determine the computational performance and efficiency that can be achieved by your HPC Pack 2008-based / Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. It calculates and reports a peak performance value for your HPC cluster in billions of floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS), and a percentage value for the efficiency that was achieved at peak performance. After running Lizard, you can review the performance and efficiency results that were obtained, and optionally save these results and the parameters that were used to achieve them to a file on your computer.

Lizard is included in the latest Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 Tool Pack and can be downloaded here. BTW, it is based on Linpack and automatically optimizes the 29 Linpack input parameters to you individual cluster.

Additional resources:

Windows HPC Server 2008
Microsoft HPC Resource Kit
Info about Linpack
Intel Math Kernel Library
Wikipedia about Lizards