Background

The Beowulf Performance Suite (BPS) was designed to provide a comprehensive and comparative way of measuring cluster performance. Although BPS contains many benchmarking programs, BPS is not designed to benchmark clusters. BPS is designed as an analysis tool to measure differences due to hardware or software changes on the same cluster. In addition, successfully running all the tests provides some assurances that the cluster is configured properly. The suite provides a graphical user interface for running the programs as well as generating HTML output files. The use of HTML make it trivial to share your results with others on the web. The following tests are available:

• bonnie - hard drive performance
• stream - memory performance
• netperf - general network performance
• netpipe - detailed network performance
• nas - nas NASA parallel tests
• unixbench - general Unix benchmarks
• lmbench - micro Linux benchmarks

In addition, all the tests are are ``open source'' and the tar files are included in the binary RPM. Some of the tests are are already compiled, while others are built when the test runs. It should be emphasized that the intent of BPS is not to try an obtain optimum numbers for your cluster, but rather generate a baseline on which to measure the effects of changes on your cluster.

Some users have questioned why the LINPACK benchmark is not included in the suite. While the LINPACK is a good measure of performance, my main concern was that the test suite would be used as a ``my cluster is better than your cluster'' set of tests due to the fact that LINPACK is used to rate the top supercomputers. My goal was to provide a set of tools to measure performance increases (or decreases) when things are changed.