Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: SPEC Bench-a-Thon
Keywords: SPEC performance benchmarks systems
Message-ID: <4828@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 29 Jun 89 16:56:15 GMT
References: <22031@abbott.mips.COM> <22033@abbott.mips.COM> <4714@ficc.uu.net> <112809@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Lines: 23

In article <112809@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>, khb%chiba@Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - SPD Languages Marketing -- MTS) writes:
> In article <4714@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> >I think one thing that would make a nice benchmark is running a few
> >generations of LIFE from a known interesting starting position, such as the

> Why would this be an interesting benchmark ?

It's simple to implement in different architectures and languages, and it
is a reasonably good test of massively parallel processing. For example,
with a connection machine running 64k processors, you could keep all
of them busy with a 256 by 256 LIFE matrix. I suppose you could get the
same result from a number of runs of some convolution on an image, but it's
not as much fun...

> The goal of any sensible
> benchmark suite is to select codes which closely resemble real work

For certain environments, that resembles real work.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.
Personal: ...!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.