Computer Architecture
ELTN 493
Lab 2
4-23-2001
Benchmarks
The benchmark program assigned to me was SPEC CPU2000 which attempts to measure the performance of the processor, memory, and the compiler of a computer system. As the successor to CPU95, SPEC CPU2000 is the next generation industry-standardized CPU-intensive benchmark suit. SPEC designed CPU2000 to provide a comparative measure of compute intensive performance across the widest practical range of hardware (http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu2000/).
The first computer architecture assigned to me to be examined is a Hewlett Packard visualize c3600 UNIX workstation with a CPU clock speed of 552Mhz and 2 gigabytes of memory. The second computer architecture is an SGI 2100 1X 350Mhz R12k with a CPU clock speed of 350Mhz and 1 gigabyte of memory. The floating point benchmarks were tested on each computer and the results can be seen at the CFP2000 results page. Fourteen applications were tested on each computer architecture, six Fortran77, four Fortran90, and four C, submitting different results. From looking at the results it looks to me that the HP computer had better results even though the SGI computer had high results in four applications. The HP computer had an overall better average across the whole range of applications.
To better understand Benchmarks and how the can vary on different architectures, we ran three different benchmarks on two different computers. The first computer architecture was Atlas, and the second was Mozart. The three programs that we ran were Sim, FFT and Dhrystone, as told in the Lab 2 procedure. I ran each of these programs on both architectures and got different results. The Sim program ran 204 seconds on Mozart and only 90.5 seconds on Atlas, the FFT program ran 1.52 seconds on Mozart and 0.595 seconds on Atlas, Dhrystone21 ran in 3.4 micro seconds on Mozart compared to 1.8 micro seconds on Atlas, and I can't find my results for Dhrystone11. All three benchmarks ran faster on Atlas than they did on Mozart. Even though the Mozart times were larger, it does not exactly mean that it is slower because when I ran the benchmarks, others in the class were running it at the same time, which would have slower the computer down. The processor for the Atlas system is a 300Mhz and I believe you told us that the Mozart system was a 75Mhz RISC machine.