[COLUG] stress-testing multi-core systems

[Jim Dinan]

Hi Scott,

You could run multiple instances of your stress-test application.  The
OS will schedule them across all available cores in the system.  If F at H
does what you want but only runs well on 4 cores, you could run 2
instances of it for 8 cores.  It's not ideal in the parallel-efficiency
sense, but it will stress all of your cores.  I've also used cpuburn in
the past (http://pages.sbcglobal.net/redelm/) which has packages for
debian/ubuntu.

 ~jim.


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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