LMbench is perhaps one of the best known and most useful suites of microbenchmarks. It is also "old" in the sense that it has been around a long time, works pretty well, and therefore can provide useful comparative results over many generations of system evolution in a variety of architectures. This and many other of its virtues are extolled on its website and FAQ linked above.
The following is a fairly standard lmbench "results" summary generated by the latest version, lmbench-2beta. Note that it was impossible or irrelevant to test disk or network on this particular system at this particular time. The most useful results in the collection below, therefore, are likely associated with CPU and memory subsystem performance.
The greatest weakness of this particular suite is that isn't really designed (yet, as I believe Carl Staelin is working on it) to test SMP performance boundaries. Because of the way the timing harness works, it may or may not, for example, make any sense at all to simply run a microbenchmark twice at the same time as one frequently does with "coarse grained" performance measures that take it for granted that e.g. system interrupts will interlace with the timed intervals.
Still, it is hard to come up with any single set of microbenchmark numbers any better than what lmbench provides to guide systems and beowulf engineering. To give you SOME local framework for these numbers, I provide a comparison to a 933 MHz single-CPU PIII with 128 MB of PC133 SDRAM.
L M B E N C H 2 . 0 S U M M A R Y ------------------------------------ (Alpha software, do not distribute) Basic system parameters ---------------------------------------------------- Host OS Description Mhz --------- ------------- ----------------------- ---- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a i686-pc-linux-gnu 1197 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- i686-pc-linux-gnu 933 Processor, Processes - times in microseconds - smaller is better ---------------------------------------------------------------- Host OS Mhz null null open selct sig sig fork exec sh call I/O stat clos TCP inst hndl proc proc proc --------- ------------- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a 1197 0.25 0.40 2.15 3.48 14 0.64 2.00 257 959 6481 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- 933 0.33 0.48 1.75 2.56 18 0.95 1.23 122 901 5048 Context switching - times in microseconds - smaller is better ------------------------------------------------------------- Host OS 2p/0K 2p/16K 2p/64K 8p/16K 8p/64K 16p/16K 16p/64K ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw --------- ------------- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------- ------- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a 1.740 3.3900 14 6.0500 176 35 173 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- 0.640 3.7400 10 5.2900 113 25 125 *Local* Communication latencies in microseconds - smaller is better ------------------------------------------------------------------- Host OS 2p/0K Pipe AF UDP RPC/ TCP RPC/ TCP ctxsw UNIX UDP TCP conn --------- ------------- ----- ----- ---- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a 1.740 7.118 19 18 22 65 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- 0.640 3.510 7.64 16 34 24 49 86 File & VM system latencies in microseconds - smaller is better -------------------------------------------------------------- Host OS 0K File 10K File Mmap Prot Page Create Delete Create Delete Latency Fault Fault --------- ------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------- ----- ----- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a 3.5448 0.7863 7.9968 1.6108 152 0.452 2.00000 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- 7.3508 0.7005 152 1.2181 2714 0.802 463 *Local* Communication bandwidths in MB/s - bigger is better ----------------------------------------------------------- Host OS Pipe AF TCP File Mmap Bcopy Bcopy Mem Mem UNIX reread reread (libc) (hand) read write --------- ------------- ---- ---- ---- ------ ------ ------ ------ ---- ----- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a 368 129 223 257 396 267 267 384 455 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- 877 537 91 330 481 151 140 481 210 Memory latencies in nanoseconds - smaller is better (WARNING - may not be correct, check graphs) --------------------------------------------------- Host OS Mhz L1 $ L2 $ Main mem Guesses --------- ------------- ---- ----- ------ -------- ------- dual.asla Linux 2.4.2-a 1197 2.506 16 206 ganesh Linux 2.2.16- 933 3.229 7.5810 129