Benchmarking idea solicitation

[Ralph Seguin]

Howdy.  Well, due the the relatively huge number of messages that I got
concerning benchmarking results, I have decided to try to compile some
sort of suite of benchmarking programs.  I'd like to have several
criteria:

- The programs should be PD or freeware or have some such licensing (as
  most people cannot afford the price of a decent suite like SPEC)
- The programs should do some sort of real computation (ie, no trivial
  benchmarks)
- The programs should consume unit of time n (n <= infinity 8-)

I'm thinking of several things: 

o DKBTrace (an excellent ray tracer that is generally available) say a ray
  trace of a moderately complex scene mapped into a 1 megapixel bitmap (24
  bit color, although this really doesn't matter)

o Mandelbrot  (Some sort of mandelbrot calculation). How about doing a
  1024x1024 of the whole set at 1000 iterations?

o LINPACK: While not the best of benchmarks, it is still a decent floating
  point thing

o Whetstones: I'm not too certain about this one.  Any arguments for or
  against?

o Dhyrstones: I'm not very eager to include this one.  This seems to be
  the crowd pleaser that a lot of people quote for MIPS.

o Integer perf: A few programs to give the flip side of the coin (since
  most of the above are floating point oriented).   Open to suggestions.

o I welcome all suggestions.

I'll compile this list of programs and make it available for anon ftp.  I
will volunteer to maintain it.  I would also like to maintain lists of
machines and benchmark results from this suite.

			Thanks, Ralph

Ralph Seguin			gilgalad at dip.eecs.umich.edu
536 South Forest Apt. #915	gilgalad at caen.engin.umich.edu
Ann Arbor, MI 48104		(313) 662-4805