Brain Murmurs

There’s been a lot of hype about using virtualization for grid computing, so I decided to do a little bit of elementary benchmarking and see how VMWare stacked up against JIVA.

I decided to compare the performance of the Scimark 2 benchmarks running in three different ways (native, JIVA, and virtual native) on the same machine, a 3.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with a gigabyte of RAM.

I started by creating a Visual Studio project to build the scimark2 native code, turning on all optimizations and specifically optimizing the build for the P4. The build ran very fast and clocked 520 MFLOPS.

I then ran the JIVA screensaver client, which actually throws graphics manipulation into the mix. The screensaver weighed in at 475 MFLOPS.

Finally, I ran the optimized Windows binary I’d created under WMWare, which clocked in a a suprisingly meager 267 MFLOPS.

Filed under: JIVA, JIVA (Technical) by Daniel