A Sandia National Laboratories software program now installed as an additional test for the widely observed TOP500 supercomputer challenge has become increasingly prominent. The program’s full name—High Performance Conjugate Gradients, or HPCG—doesn’t come trippingly to the tongue, but word is seeping out that this relatively new benchmarking program is becoming as valuable as its venerable partner—the High Performance LINPACK program—which some say has become less than satisfactory in measuring many of today’s computational challenges.