As one of the first steps inpriming the pump for Phoronix benchmarks, I ran the wspy program on 21 candidate CPU benchmarks. My goal was to start with a rough characterization, e.g. single-threaded vs. multi-threaded or cpu-bound vs not.

#!/bin/bash
while read benchmark
do
    /home/mev/wspy/wspy -o cpu-wspy-${benchmark}.txt phoronix-test-suite batch-r
un ${benchmark} > cpu-${benchmark}.output.txt 2>&1
done < cpu-benchlist.txt

Results are listed below. A few more general comments:

• Examining the wspy profiles, I break the tests into several groups:
  • graphics programs: padman, etqw-demo; multiple threads, one or two very busy others less so.
  • multi-core programs: john-the-ripper, ttsiod-renderer, compress-pbip2, compress-7zip ffmpeg, openssl, c-ray, povray, smallpt, tachyon, stream; all CPUs, close to 100% user time, symmetric operations. How many are small in-cache toys and how many are bigger?
  • multi-core programs: not 100% user time: x264, apache, mafft; what is taking up other times?
  • single-threaded programs: encode-mp3, encode-flac, himeno, crafty, tscp

  These classifications also give me some additional things to look for when looking further at performance counters.

• Benchmark scores are listed as a sanity check that the experiments were similar to my previous run. Since the primary goal is rough characterization I haven't done a lot to control the runs, but one can make a few observations of wspy test overhead and potentially likely noise: (a) the DES benchmark stands out as having a 15% better score run under instrumentation (b) overall 14 scores are better in this run vs. 11 worse in this run and range is +15% (des) to -4% (apache) with all but 2 scores (des, himeno) being within 5%. As a result, it doesn't look like wspy is particularly onerous in preturbing adding overhead to this run.
• Two of the benchmarks (padman, etqw-demo) report only a single run as part of the cpu suite, but run nine combinations of different graphics resolutions when run by themselves. Still comparable in scores, but also more processes in the wspy output.