SPARK. A benchmark package for sparse computations

As the diversity of novel architectures expands rapidly there is a growing interest in studying the behavior of these architectures for computations arising in different applications. There has been significant efforts in evaluating the performance of supercomputers on typical dense computations, and several packages for this purpose have been developed, such as the Linpack benchmark, the Lawrence Livermore Loops, and the Los Alamos Kernels. On the other hand there has been little effort put into evaluating the performance of these architectures on the more complicated and perhaps more important sparse computations. In the paper a package is proposed to fill this gap. Its goal is not only to evaluate the performance of supercomputers on sparse computations, but also the analyze the machine-algorithm interaction.