Platform Evaluation (slightly offtopic)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Chris Greer wrote:

> I am now faced with the problem of testing a new hardware
> platform and determining how it stacks up against current
> hardware.  We run a mixture of Sparc and X86 machines where
> I work.
>
> Can anyone suggest a site that can help me get good benchmarks
> for CPU comparisions (We need to evaluate the an application that
> benefits from greater clock speeds, and something that benefits more
> from SMP machines).  We also need to benchmark I/O subsystems.
>
> Before, we used some basic test like prime number calculations
> to stress CPU, and something like bonnie++ for disk I/O, but
> we are looking for something that may end up being a little more
> unbiased as far as CPU architecture (most prime number code
> have highly optimized routines for X86 vs. Sparc Vs. Alpha).
>
> Can anyone point me to resource or pointers for this?

I answered this once today already, but lmbench (www.bitmover.com) is
probably the best microbenchmark suite around.

   rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu