Benchmarking higher-end CPUs

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

At work we're about to buy some new servers to run our main
computational load. We're looking for the best
price-to-performance ratio, and we think the best way to do
that is to measure, rather than guess.

If you have a high-end machine running Linux, I'd like to talk to you
about running a benchmark on it.

- No root access needed
- The benchmark should take less than 5 minutes to run.
- It's contained in a 12MB tar.gz. Open it, run one command,
  and delete it.
- The benchmark will run, and mail back the following:
  - elapsed time to run
  - cat /proc/cpuinfo
  - cat /proc/meminfo
  - about 2-3 pages of results that will pinpoint anything weird in
    your floating point units.

It's fine to run it in a jail, or as a user with no privileges
of any special sort.

If you have an Athlon64, an Opteron, a high-range Xeon or
Itanium, please let me know if you're willing to help us out.
You'll have our undying gratitude.

Thanks,

Dan Ritter