On Wed, 7 Oct 1998, Jon Pike wrote:
> What does the group recommend for a good performance benchmark,
> and why?
> Please don't forget where, as well! :-)
Depends on your application (I know that isn't what you wanted to hear).
The supercomputer people tend to follow linpack (see
http://www.top500.org/). OS people look at lmbench
(http://www.bitmover.com/).
One problem with the standard benchmark protocols is that they assume that
your compiler will be doing the parallelization, and (as far as I know)
gcc does not. So you either have to buy a parallel compiler, live with
single CPU results, or write your own benchmark. For amusement, I wrote a
parallel version of McCalpin's STREAMS benchmark, you can get it at
ftp://taiga.gmcl.com/pub/stream.tgz. The speedup for 2 CPUs on my machine
is quite small; which makes sense, given that STREAMS is a test of the
bus, and there's only one bus.
doug.
