By Henry A. Gabb and Chirag G. Shah, Intel Corporation

SciMark 2.0* is a floating-point benchmark from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It consists of five computational kernels:

1. FFT - performs a complex 1D fast Fourier transform
2. SOR - solves the Laplace equation in 2D by successive over-relaxation
3. MC - computes pi by Monte Carlo integration
4. MM - multiplies two sparse matrices in compressed-row format
5. LU - computes the LU factorization of a dense N x N matrix

These kernels represent the types of calculations that commonly occur in numerically-intensive scientific applications. As such, SciMark 2.0 is widely-used to measure CPU performance. This paper demonstrates simple optimizations using Intel software products to improve SciMark 2.0 performance.