ESP: A System Utilization Benchmark

This article describes a new benchmark, called the Effective System Performance (ESP) test, which is designed to measure system-level performance, including such factors as job scheduling efficiency, handling of large jobs and shutdown-reboot times. In particular, this test can be used to study the effects of various scheduling policies and parameters. We present here some results that we have obtained so far on the Cray T3E and IBM SP systems, together with insights obtained from simulations.