New Linux Benchmarks For Stressing Tux

For those interested in doing some weekend Linux performance benchmarking, there are some interesting new test profiles that are newly-committed.

Pushed earlier this month to OpenBenchmarking.org for use by the Phoronix Test Suite were several new and updated open-source benchmarks for Linux and other operating systems. Landing this week were two more test profiles.

The first new test profile landing this week on our collaborative benchmarking platform is Primesieve. Primesieve generates prime numbers using a highly optimized sieve of Eratosthenes implementation. Primesieve benchmarks the CPU's L1 cache performance. This test profile is compatible with not only Linux but also Windows, Solaris, OS X, and BSD -- all the major platforms where the Phoronix Test Suite is also supported. I've uploaded a few initial results from Primesieve to get started, including from the new FX-8350 Vishera CPU.

The other test profile is Open Porous Media, which is an interesting and new benchmark coming out from Phoronix Test Suite collaboration with the industries. The current version of this test profile is still considered a bit experimental as there's still a few upstream problems to work out (e.g. segmentation fault in certain situations and validating the data internally within the software when being benchmarked), but it's a very interesting test case so it's worth mentioning. If you want to run open-porous-media already that's great to collect some early data to see how well the test is taking to run and other metrics to help improve the test profile. This is a test of a DUNE (Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment) module called OPM Benchmarks from the Open Porous Media project. Open Porous Media is a set of open-source tools concerning simulation of flow and transport of fluids in porous media.

Open Porous Media is multi-threaded and very demanding upon the system, but is a very real-world workload and relevant to those within geology, oil exploration, etc. Once this test profile is fully ready, it should be a particularly interesting -- and leading -- Linux system benchmark. More information on the Open Porous Media project itself can be found out about at OPM-Project.org.

If you want to try out these new tests, it's simply a matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark primesieve open-porous-media from the Phoronix Test Suite client. You can also see other new/updated tests by running phoronix-test-suite openbenchmarking-changes.

On a related note, if you missed it from earlier this week, Phoronix Test Suite 4.2 Milestone 2 was released with various changes. The main feature coming to this latest development milestone for the "Randaberg" release is autonomously determining interesting benchmarks for your system based upon various factors.