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Benchmarking of CPU resources in WLCG has been based on the HEP-SPEC06 (HS06) suite for over a decade. It has recently become clear that HS06, which is based on real applications from non-HEP domains, no longer describes typical HEP workloads. The aim of the HEP-Benchmarks project is to develop a new benchmark suite for WLCG compute resources, based on real applications from the LHC experiments. By construction, these new benchmarks are thus guaranteed to have a score highly correlated to the throughputs of HEP applications, and a CPU usage pattern similar to theirs. Linux containers and the CernVM-FS filesystem are the two main technologies enabling this approach, which had been considered impossible in the past. In this paper, we review the motivation, implementation and outlook of the new benchmark suite.

As of 2009, HEP-SPEC06 (HS06) is the benchmark adopted by the WLCG community to describe the computing requirements of the LHC experiments, to assess the computing capacity of the WLCG data centres and to procure new hardware. In the recent years, following the evolution of CPU architectures and the adoption of new programming paradigms, such as multi-threading and vectorization, it has turned out that HS06 is less representative of the relevant applications running on the WLCG infrastructure. Meanwhile, in 2017 a new SPEC generation of benchmarks for CPU intensive workloads has been released: SPEC CPU 2017. This report summarises the findings of the HEPiX Benchmarking Working Group in comparing SPEC CPU 2017 and other HEP benchmarks with the typical WLCG workloads mixes.