The only benchmarks that I've ever found useful are the ones on that measure the performance of commonly used applications (for example all the great stuff on video cards at Tom's Hardware Page). That's all I really care about. Benchmarks of arbitrary performance are only useful to most home users for whacking off to.
Most companies that develop systems that might require some form of benchmarks are likely going to have to develop their own with prototypes of their application, I can't see anything arbitrary being very helpful in predicting how a particular system will perform in comparison with any other system.
DWDM (Dense Wave-Dimension Multiplexing) has been tested at speeds much faster than for the WAN. I do not have any references handy, but a carrier was advertising multiplexing 32 colors of DWDM in the WAN, and Lincoln Labs has tested 200+ colors of DWDM. In these cases, each color was a single SONET OC-192 link. For the existing 32 color system that is 320 gigabits/sec for a single network link! The basic idea is that the signal is spread out into several channels that are different wavelengths of light on the fiber, or 'colors'. One color is reserved for control information. One of the current stumbling blocks of DWDM is that most fiber repeaters in existing networks were not designed to propogate multiple wavelengths, just signal strength, so they will muddy things up after a few wavelengths are used. This is not a huge problem in the US, but is a big problem when one considers the cost of replacing repeaters in undersea cables. An intersting thing about DWDM is that each color can carry a different protocol - for instance you can have a couple colors of Packet over SONET, and a couple of ATM over SONET. There is also talk of running IP directly over DWDM, but an intermediate protocol needs to be developed to handle some of the layer 1 functionality of SONET that DWDM itself does not take care of. Lincoln Labs and Lucent are both doing a lot of work in this area.
On the subject of distributed OSes,/.ers might find it interesting to take a look at the Plan 9 OS that was (still is?) in development at Bell Labs several years ago. The FAQ is here.
Plan 9 is UNIX-like, but it treats all system objects like files. This includes objects that exist across the network. Because of this, it is very easy to distribute the OS across several machines with it being completely transparent to the user. We set Plan 9 up like this in the OS lab at my college a couple years back, it's very odd.
It probably isn't an OS that will pick up by itself, but it's an example of a way in which an OS can be distributed with a reasonable degree of transparency.
Microsoft wouldn't be where they are today without alienating power home users from the start, by insisting that every copy of their software be paid for. Until them, 'pirating' was a freely accepted mode in the community. Truly innovative.
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Most companies that develop systems that might require some form of benchmarks are likely going to have to develop their own with prototypes of their application, I can't see anything arbitrary being very helpful in predicting how a particular system will perform in comparison with any other system.
DWDM (Dense Wave-Dimension Multiplexing) has been tested at speeds much faster than for the WAN. I do not have any references handy, but a carrier was advertising multiplexing 32 colors of DWDM in the WAN, and Lincoln Labs has tested 200+ colors of DWDM. In these cases, each color was a single SONET OC-192 link. For the existing 32 color system that is 320 gigabits/sec for a single network link! The basic idea is that the signal is spread out into several channels that are different wavelengths of light on the fiber, or 'colors'. One color is reserved for control information. One of the current stumbling blocks of DWDM is that most fiber repeaters in existing networks were not designed to propogate multiple wavelengths, just signal strength, so they will muddy things up after a few wavelengths are used. This is not a huge problem in the US, but is a big problem when one considers the cost of replacing repeaters in undersea cables. An intersting thing about DWDM is that each color can carry a different protocol - for instance you can have a couple colors of Packet over SONET, and a couple of ATM over SONET. There is also talk of running IP directly over DWDM, but an intermediate protocol needs to be developed to handle some of the layer 1 functionality of SONET that DWDM itself does not take care of. Lincoln Labs and Lucent are both doing a lot of work in this area.
Plan 9 is UNIX-like, but it treats all system objects like files. This includes objects that exist across the network. Because of this, it is very easy to distribute the OS across several machines with it being completely transparent to the user. We set Plan 9 up like this in the OS lab at my college a couple years back, it's very odd.
It probably isn't an OS that will pick up by itself, but it's an example of a way in which an OS can be distributed with a reasonable degree of transparency.
Microsoft wouldn't be where they are today without alienating power home users from the start, by insisting that every copy of their software be paid for. Until them, 'pirating' was a freely accepted mode in the community. Truly innovative.