[COLUG] stress-testing multi-core systems

[Travis Sidelinger]

Scott,

Here is another one that will keep your system busy by launching a huge number
of busy processes:

  $ while((1)); do echo $x; sh -c 'for((i=0;i<100000;i++)); do echo $RANDOM >
/dev/null; done &'; done

I reached a load average >100 before I killed it off.

Haven't tried this yet, but maybe using a real file instead of /dev/null will
keep your file system busy too.

  $ while((1)); do echo $x; sh -c 'for((i=0;i<100000;i++)); do echo $RANDOM >>
/tmp/test; done &'; done


Scott Merrill wrote:
> Are there any applications (Windows or GNU/Linux) that folks can
> recommend to stress-test _all_ the cores in the modern multi-core
> system?  We have ~100 dual-CPU quad-core systems we'd like to burn in.
>  We'd been using Folding at Home, but it has a hard limit for only 4
> cores, so we're no longer able to stress the entire system with one
> application.
> 
> We're toying with using VMWare Server to create a GNU/Linux virtual
> machine in which to run a distributed computing client (F at H or other).
>  VMWare Server has a limit of only supporting 2 cores per VM, so we'd
> need to run 4 instances of our VM, each running whatever stress-test
> app we decide.
> 
> This is less ideal than a native F at H (or similar) solution, which can
> be configured to run in such a way that it only fires up when the
> system is idle, and reduces its load when a user is actually doing
> something on the PC.  This "stress-when-idle" mode is greatly
> preferred, so that we can continually stress the systems without
> getting in the way of our students.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks!
> Scott
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