Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!olivea!samsung!emory!utkcs2!de5
From: de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill)
Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Subject: Re: benchmark evaluations
Message-ID: <1990Dec12.140615.27870@cs.utk.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 90 14:06:15 GMT
References: <12220@hubcap.clemson.edu> <1990Dec12.070209.3272@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.utk.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: Dave Sill <de5@ornl.gov>
Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Lines: 40

In article <1990Dec12.070209.3272@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, gl8f@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
>In article <12220@hubcap.clemson.edu> mark@hubcap.clemson.edu (Mark Smotherman) writes:
>
>>IMHO, "bc" only has compactness on its side, with representativeness
>>questionable and reproducibility totally ruled out.  Why, then, is there
>>continuing interest?
>
>Because the group isn't moderated?

The fact that you'd moderate this thread out is evidence that leaving
it unmoderated was the right decision.  Just because you don't like
it, or think it's good enough, doesn't mean others should be denied
it.

>Because people don't have any other benchmarks to run?

I doubt that.  Anyone with news access surely has access to e-mail
and, hence, netlib.

>Because people think benchmarking should be quick and easy?

It should, whenever possible.

>I think on of the bad things about SPEC is that it's not easy to
>obtain the source. This is good because it means people are a little
>more careful when running it because they probably actually read the
>instructions, but it's bad because random peons don't have a big list
>of results for all systems, and they can't go run it on their favorite
>off-brand of computer. And that's partially why there's interest in
>running bc.

Could be.  Why doesn't someone keep a table of SPEC results?

>Of course, if they get most of their income by selling SPEC tapes, I
>guess there's no choice but to not bite the hand that feeds SPEC.

-- 
Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov)
Martin Marietta Energy Systems
Workstation Support