Speed Tests

I was wondering how fast the various machines, that I have access to, are. So I devised a few
simple tests to check for myself. The tests check the kind of things that interest me,
and should not viewed as a true benchmark (whatever that means).

Tests

I ran three small C programs from the shell compiled with gcc-2.95/6 by gcc -O2... -lm and
timed with "time" (rounded to the nearest sec.). On the Suns I also used the Sun compiler
with cc -xO3 -xtarget=ultra -fast ... -lm

A brief description of the programs is:

integral computes an approximation to a triple integral of a transcendental function
over a ball. This involves lots of floating point arithmetic.
prime computes the 300,000th prime by brute force division (which is much slower than the sieve method used below). This involves lots of integer arithmetic.
goldbach is perhaps the most mathematically interesting program. It checks Goldbach's conjecture up to 100,000,000. This involves working with huge arrays.

For more details see source code .

I did three more tests:

I timed the make step , using gnu make, for building xdvik-22.40n.
I timed the make step , using gnu make, for building emacs-21.2.
I took the time taken to latex a complicated document with lots of formulas and diagrams.

To test the multiprocessing features on Banach, I also tried parallelizing make, using the -j8 option, in the first two tests.

Machines

PBook = Apple powerbook/G3 233Mhz processor/ 64 MB ram/linuxppc 2K (2.2.15 kernel)
Ultra5 = Sun Ultra 5/ 360Mhz ultrasparc processor/ 320 MB ram/ Solaris 8
G4 =Apple G4/ 450Mhz G4 processor/ 448 MB ram/ Yellowdog linux 2.2 (2.4.18 kernel)
Banach = Sun server/ 4x 450Mhz ultrasparc processors / 4GB ram /Solaris 8
Athlon = Generic box/ 1.2 Ghz Athlon/ 256 MB ram/ Debian linux (2.4.14 kernel)
Xeon=Dell/2.2Ghz Xeon/1GB ram/Redhat 7.3 (2.4.18 kernel)

Results

Time in seconds.

Machine	integral	prime	goldbach
PBook (gcc)	86	57	165
Ultra5 (gcc)	53	108	100
Ultra5 (cc)	44	85	95
G4 (gcc)	41	30	44
Banach (gcc)	40	81	61
Banach (cc)	32	64	61
Athlon (gcc)	16	19	44
Xeon (gcc)	16	14	15

Machine	latex	make xdvik	make emacs
PBook	22
Ultra5	12
G4	6	192	300
Banach	6	261	364
Banach (parallel)		134	132
Athlon	2
Xeon	2	58	75