An overview of common benchmarks

The three most often used benchmarks are characterized in detail and users are warned about a number of pitfalls. Two of them, Whetstone and Drystone, are synthetic benchmarks: they were written solely for benchmarking purposes and perform no useful computation. Linpack was distilled out of a real, purposeful program that is now used as a benchmark. Some other benchmarks, namely Livermore Fortran Kernels, Stanford Small Programs Benchmark Set, EDN benchmarks, Sieve of Eratosthenes, Rhealstone and SPEC benchmarks, are briefly considered. Non-CPU influences in benchmark performance are discussed.>