CSE 551 -- Programming Assignment #1

For this assignment, you will write and run a few microbenchmarks on bicycle.cs.washington.edu, one of the department's Linux machines. Here's what I'd like you to measure; precisely how you design and implement your measure code is up to you.

1. Linux's system call overhead. (Note: your answer will be in the microsecond time scale.)

2. The latency to perform a disk seek on one of bicycle.cs's disks. (Note: your answer will be in the millisecond time scale.)

3. The sequential read bandwidth of one of bicycle's disks. (Note: your answer will be in the tens of megabytes per second range.)

• bicycle.cs is used by many people, so you will need to make sure your measurement results aren't affected by somebody else's program. I recommend you find a time when no other programs are running, and run your benchmarks then. If this turns out not to be possible (i.e., bicycle.cs is busy all the time), then find another linux machine to run them on.

• bicycle.cs is used by many people, so you need to make sure your benchmarks aren't too disruptive. Your benchmarks have no need to run more than a few seconds or tens of seconds...

What to turn in

• a very, very short description of your measurement design -- no more than a handful of sentences on each measurement

• your results

• your source code (in whatever language or scripting environment you used)