Benchmarking Package

This package contains functions for measuring the performance of Mathematica on your computer and for producing a comparison report that includes benchmark results for other computers. The MathematicaMark8 benchmark, a collection of typical numeric and symbolic computations, is used for evaluating the performance of the computer system on which Mathematica is run.

The overall MathematicaMark8 result is computed as the geometric mean of the reciprocal of individual timings, normalized with respect to a reference system. The timings for the individual computations are measured with AbsoluteTiming, which returns wall-clock time. Users are encouraged to minimize cpu usage by other processess during execution. Running the MathematicaMark8 benchmark takes about 30 seconds on the reference system and requires 512 MB of free memory.

BenchmarkReport runs the MathematicaMark8 benchmark and produces a notebook report that compares the performance of your computer with results from several known systems. If no front end is available, a plain text version of the report is returned.

Benchmark runs the MathematicaMark8 benchmark and returns the results as raw data. This package includes a collection of benchmark results for a variety of systems as given in $BenchmarkSystems.

You can create a customized comparison report using BenchmarkReport by specifying computer systems from $BenchmarkSystems and raw benchmark data as returned by Benchmark.