
     Benchmarks

     There are a bunch of benchmarks on this disk.  They serve various
purposes and some overlap in what they are designed to test.  Some (such as
the Byte benchmark) are included only because there is an existing database of 
results already so that you can get an immediate (although rough) idea of the 
performance of your iron in comparison to other popular types.

     If you should feel so inclined, you may run some or all of the benchmarks 
and report (on the forms provided, please) the results to me (preferably by US
Mail).

     George Schreyer
     412 North Maria Avenue
     Redondo Beach, Ca.
     90277

     I will try to condense the results that I receive into some form of 
digestable format.  Presenting tables of performance numbers will be too 
cumbersome, so I will probably rank the speed of various computers based on a 
few of the pertanent benchmarks and note any hardware which is particularly
fast or slow at some particular operation, such as reals or somesuch.

     I will describe the purpose of each of them (if I know it) and what it is
primarily designed to test.  

     PWROF2. This benchmark test integer arithmetic exclusively.  It computes
the first 90 powers of 2.

     QUICKSORT.  This is the conventional recursive quicksort algorithm which 
sorts 10000 integers.  It tests integer arithmetic and it uses recursion 
and array indexing heavily.

     NUMBERIO.  This one writes a file of 25,000 real numbers and then reads 
them back.  It tests file I/O speed but is not particularly sensitive to
disk access time as only a few blocks are read and written, and no long head 
seeks are involved.  UCSD Pascal I/O is generally slow.

     8QUEENS.  This benchmark is another test of recursion and iterive 
constructs such as IF-THEN and FOR loops.

     PRIMES.  This one finds the first 1000 primes.  It is more 
computationally intensive than PWROF2.

     ANCEST.S.  This one manipulates sets.

     WHETSTONE.  This is a pascal implementation (from the original ALGOL) of 
the "magic" WHETSTONE benchmark.  It is a collection of weighted procedures 
which exercise the numerical capabilities of a machine.  It is often quoted in 
performance comparisons of various mainframes.  It is written to foil 
optimizing compilers and force execution of all of its constructs.  It is 
rather heavily biased to test real numbers.

     SIEVE.  This is the infamous Byte Benchmark, modified to compile under 
UCSD.  It is NOT modified to run the fastest under UCSD as a considerable 
database has been accumlated with the version supplied.  Within the file, you 
will find the results of several types of computers.

     BENCH.USUS.  This is the benchmark published in NL#4 by Jon Bondy.  It is 
a series of short loops which test specific constructs of UCSD Pascal.  This 
one (and the similar following ones) will probably be my best basis for 
machine and UCSD version comparison.

     LONG_INT.  This is similar to BENCH.USUS except that it specifically 
tests the performance of long interger operations.  Long integers are
implemented differently in different UCSD implementations, and I am interested 
if there are any significant differences in the performance between versions.

     INTRINSICS.  This one tests the results of several of the system 
intrinsics such as SIN and COS.  Again, I expect a wide variance of results 
from different UCSD systems.

     QUR.  This simple test indicates the general response of the operating 
system and disk system.  Its result changes radically for different disk 
systems and very radically between versions II.0 and IV.0.

     COMPKILLER.  This one is designed to crash your computer.  It indicates,
in a simple minded way, how big a program your system can compile by 
measuring the available size of the compiler symbol table.  Version IV.0 isn't 
nice enough to tell you this.

     STARS.  This one measures the speed of single character I/O.  It produced 
some suprising results under the LSI-11 extended memory implementation of 
IV.1.

     SEGMASHER.  Segmasher tests the speed of segment swaps.  Further 
instructions are given in the file.

     If this is all too much work to consider, then please just run two of the 
easist, SIEVE and QUR and submit just that data ALONG WITH YOUR SYSTEM 
CONFIGURATION AND p-SYSTEM VERSION!  SIEVE will more or less indicate your
system's processor speed and QUR will evaluate (among other things) your disk
system speed.

     regards - gws

