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Some years ago a friend created a 'benchmark' (Note: Not a benchmark) by which wouldwhich we measure one raw aspect of computing power. Namely how fast (or indeed slowly) the computer could count to a large number. We called it "Hugo's Random Benchmark".
http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/wiki/HugoRandomBenchmark
It consists of the following simple line which can be pasted into a shell to gauge computational power.
time perl -e 'for($i=0;$i<1e8;$i++) { }'
It's very silly, largely pointless but was popular in our LUG for some time. One thing we never figured out was a simple way to do the same thing to test multi-core / multi-thread processors. How can this be achieved?
I'd like a simple easily copy/paste-able script which doesn't rely on installing many additional dependencies. We tend to run this on Linux/Unix systems so can assume some version of Perl (or Python) may be around, not necessarily additional perl modules / libraries.
Is there a simple way to carve this work up to an arbitrary number of cores and still get a reliably computed total runtime at the end?