reliable/reproduceable benchmarks on SGI MIPS box

[Andrew Hume]

In article <9932 at pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>, tve at sprite.berkeley.edu (Thorsten von Eicken) writes:
~ ... quick 2 cents worth of guesses:
~ you haven't said whether you're running your program on all 8 processors
~ or on only one of them. if you're running on only one, could it be that
~ the other seven interfere? What happens if you run a "for(;;);" program
~ on seven processors while running the benchmark on the eighth?
~ also, is there a cache-flush system call you can call before starting the
~ timer?


	the program runs on just one cpu. the other processes are presumably
idle (or running some idle process). does cache-flush refer to file system?
if so, i don't see the need; my benchmark generates 200 bytes every run
(5 bytes/sec) and i'm sure one of the other 7 spare cpu's could handle
sending that one block off.

	still puzzled,
	andrew

p.s. how the hell do the specmark people do this stuff?