A Workstation's Communication Performance Benchmark

In this paper we propose a communication benchmark suite: BTU(Bits To the User). In the BTU benchmarking process, the vendor supplies a workstation running a UNIX operating system, we install our benchmark program and connect the workstation to a testbed, consisting of blackboxes, which emulates a LAN/WAN environment. The benchmark run will submit the workstation to a carefully designed combination of tests. The result is a predictor of what the user, at the application level, can expect in terms of bits sent to or received from a remote host. Our benchmark takes into account concurrent activities such as CPU and I/O activities which compete for resources on the test machine. The combination of these activities and concurrent activities on the network will interfere with the test machine's communication performance. This methodology is in contrast to existing benchmark suites that measure just the compute performance of a given workstation or the maximum network throughput under ideal conditions. The automated BTU benchmark test suite produces results at various levels of abstractions ranging from a single number, characterizing average performance in the style of SPEC92, to a TCP time sequence chart for abnormal behaviors. We intend to serve the user of a workstation and provide data on how a particularly conngured workstation can be expected to perform in a realistic network environment. The information should enable the users to make a reasonable judgment when acquiring a workstation with a speciic connguration within certain cost constraints. For this reason, we give the results of the benchmark test together with a detailed speciication of the test machine and its list price. Our results when used along with existing benchmarks will make a powerful combination for predicting good overall performance. Neither price nor SPECmarks are as good a predictor of communication performance as that measured by BTUs. We conclude this paper with a discussion of extensions to faster networks and our plans for having the community accept this proposal as a communication benchmark.