Editing Hierarchical INTegration

'''Hierarchical INTegration''', or '''HINT''' for short, is a computer [[Benchmark (computing)|benchmark]] that ranks a computer system as a whole (i.e. the entire computer instead of individual components). It measures the full range of performance, mostly based on the amount of work a computer can perform over time. A system with a very fast processor would likely be rated poorly if the [[Computer bus|buses]] were very poor compared to those of another system that had both an average processor and average buses. For example, in the past, [[Apple Macintosh|Macintosh]] computers with relatively slow processor speeds (800&nbsp;MHz) used to perform better than [[x86]] based systems with processors running at nearly 2&nbsp;GHz.

HINT is known for being almost immune to artificial optimization and can be used by many computers ranging from a calculator to a supercomputer. It was developed at the [[U.S. Department of Energy]]'s [[Ames Laboratory]] and is licensed under the terms of the [[GNU General Public License]].

HINT is intended to be "scalable" to run on any size computer, from small serial systems to highly parallel supercomputers.<ref>{{cite book|doi=10.1109/HICSS.1995.375519|chapter-url=http://www.johngustafson.net/pubs/pub47/Hint.htm|chapter=HINT: A new way to measure computer performance|title=Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences|pages=392–401|year=1995|last1=Gustafson|first1=J. L.|last2=Snell|first2=Q. O.|isbn=0-8186-6935-7|s2cid=17572925 |url=https://zenodo.org/record/1269297}}</ref>
The person using the HINT benchmark can use any floating-point or integer type.<ref>{{cite journal|first1=J. |last1=Gustafson|url=http://johngustafson.net/images/8f-Gustafson-Productivity.pdf|title=Purpose-based benchmarks|journal=The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications|volume=18|issue=4|pages=475–487|doi=10.1177/1094342004048540|citeseerx=10.1.1.684.150|year=2004|s2cid=5786180 }} See pages  5, 11.</ref>

HINT benchmark results have been published comparing a variety of parallel and uniprocessor systems.<ref>John L. Gustafson, Quinn O. Snell, and Rajat Todi.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160109061553/https://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmpe220/Winter08/paperPresentations/andrewHINT.pdf "The HINT Benchmark"].</ref>

A related tool ANALYTIC HINT can be used as a design tool to estimate the benefits of using more memory, a faster processor, or improved communications (bus speed) within the system.<ref>{{cite document|author1=Gustafson, John|author2= Snell, Quinn| author3=  Heller, Don. |title=Scalable Computer Performance and Analysis (Hierarchical INTegration). Computer software|publisher= DOE/ER |date= 2 September 1999 |osti=1230480 }}</ref>

== See also ==
* [[John Gustafson (scientist)]]

== References ==
{{reflist}}

== External links ==
{{Portal|Free and open-source software}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130724124556/http://hint.byu.edu/ official site]
* [http://www.johngustafson.net/images/HINTofThingsToCome.pdf article discussing HINT benchmark]
* [http://www.ima.umn.edu/~coult/hint.tar.gz benchmark sources download]{{dead link|date=August 2015}}
* [http://www.cs.kent.edu/~farrell/cc11/reference/hint/ benchmark sources download]

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[[Category:Benchmarks (computing)]]