Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code generation and reasoning, motivating extensive benchmarks for evaluating functional correctness. However, performance optimization in High-Performance Computing (HPC) poses fundamentally different challenges that are not captured by existing evaluations: HPC performance depends on low-level code, intricate memory access patterns, and computational kernels embedded within sophisticated execution contexts. We introduce HPC-Bench, a performance-grounded benchmark for evaluating LLMs as optimizers of computational kernels in realistic HPC workloads, including 114 workloads across 16 HPC computational motifs. HPC-Bench provides a fully automated, end-to-end evaluation pipeline that combines program-level correctness verification with two correctness-gated metrics, Fast@k and Speedup@k, to characterize reliability and speedup under a fixed sampling budget. Our evaluation of three representative LLMs across serial CPU, OpenMP, and CUDA settings shows that stricter speedup requirements substantially reduce the probability of finding a correct and fast optimization. HPC-Bench is available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code generation and reasoning, motivating extensive benchmarks for evaluating functional correctness. However, performance optimization in High-Performance Computing (HPC) poses fundamentally different challenges that are not captured by existing evaluations: HPC performance depends on low-level code, intricate memory access patterns, and computational kernels embedded within sophisticated execution […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":351,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,89,3],"tags":[451,215,1782,14,1682,20,2066,252,176],"class_list":["post-31471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-nvidia-cuda","category-paper","tag-benchmarking","tag-code-generation","tag-computer-science","tag-cuda","tag-hpc","tag-nvidia","tag-nvidia-a100","tag-openmp","tag-package"],"views":187,"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/351"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31475,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31471\/revisions\/31475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}