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Easy, Fast, Cheap Way to Generate CPU Load?
jsailor asks: "A large client and their engineering team will be evaluating cabinets and their ability to cool high density blade server deployments. Some of these systems can consume upward of 21 kW per rack and accordingly require a lot of airflow and/or liquid systems to cool. The systems actively monitor heat conditions, increase airflow rates, and can throttle CPU speeds if necessary. What we need is an easy, fast, and cheap way to run the 2-way and 4-way blades at or near peak CPU utilization for extended periods of time so thermal analysis can be performed. Ideally, we would be able to boot them off a CD and have some means of monitoring the CPU on each or even setting the level of CPU utilization we'd like them to run at. Please note that we do NOT need to simulate a real world application and disk and network access are not of much concern. While running your favorite compute-intensive project is a nice idea, we need something simple so I've come to the Slashdot community for assistance. What are your thoughts?"
CPU Burn-in and cpuburn
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
So you need simple, fast, no-need-for-network CPU load?
/dev/urandom | gzip > /dev/null
/dev/zero to a blank HD (since you are booting from CD, destroying the contents of the HD won't crash the OS)
Boot any linux liveCD that supports your hardware, and run the following command:
cat
Sould eat one whole CPU and run forever. If you have an SMP machine, run one instance of that per CPU, and you should max out. The system should still remain responsive enough that you can terminate the processes at will, even though the CPU is at 100% usage.
I would try to pick a liveCD that does not bother starting X since that just adds to the boot time.
You may want to consider the heat generated by components other than the CPU. Hard drives put off a significant amount of heat, as do memory and video, and to a lesser extent network hardware.
To utilize a lot of memory as well as CPU, you might look for something like a prime-factoring program. (prime seives love to eat memory)
For video heat, try something like an unlimited framerate demo in Quake 2. (I think there is even a Linux port)
For network load, just use a ping utility that supports flood-ping and arbitrary payloads. Then floodping yourself or something on the LAN with huge packets.
For hard drive heat, you could just dd