Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Easy, Fast, Cheap Way to Generate CPU Load?

Posted by Cliff on from the whip-that-processor-into-shape dept.

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?"

4 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Distributed.Net, surely. by Kris_J · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Distributed.Net always shows me what happens to a PC permanently at 100% CPU load. Had to remove it from the student labs because it caused all the Dells to turn their fans up full. The noise! There are ports for pretty much everything.

  2. Distributed projects by OAB_X · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Run seti@home, folding@home, and distributed.net all at once. That should really go for them. Plus they are all linux compatible as well as windows.

  3. Remember the disks too by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 2, Insightful


    Disk drives generate heat (and fail first from it). To keep your drives excercised, check out Bonnie.

  4. It's not so easy by Phil+Karn · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I don't think it's quite as easy as running a simple infinite loop. That will certainly peg the CPU utilization at 100%, but it probably won't maximize the power drain and heat output.

    Modern CPUs are complicated beasts, with multiple execution units, deep pipelines and big caches. And they're connected to big external memories and disk drive arrays. If you want to stress-test the cooling system, then you need code that keeps all the execution units and all the pipelines and the caches and main memory and the disk array all going full blast. That's not as easy as it sounds. Intel has mentioned various test programs that they use when thermally testing their CPUs, but I don't know that they've ever released them. Perhaps they're afraid they'd might cause damage, and they'd have to deal with a lot of irate customers.