Next Generation of HEP CPU Benchmarks

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.