best scientific benchmark is Hint (Score 1)

Hint is designed to fulfill the following goals.

• Scalability. Runs on a calculator, even on your brain. No need to upgrade benchmarks every year.
• Compiler independent. No easy "cheating" possible.
• Speed dependent on problem size is calculated. Different processors have different cache sizes and perform by a factor of 10 or more differently on different problem sizes.
• You can check every result, Hint is Open Source and free.

As most other benchmarks fulfill none of the design goals above, almost all benchmarks are nearly useless.

What is HINT?

HINT or Hierarchical INTegration is a computer benchmarking tool developed at the Scalable Computing Laboratory (SCL) of Ames Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Scientific Computing, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Unlike traditional benchmarks, HINT neither fixes the size of the problem nor the calculation time and instead uses a measure called QUIPS (QUality Improvement Per Second).

This enables HINT to display the speed for a given machine specification and problem size. Computers typically start up fast and slow down as they run out of fast memory and start using the main memory, or slow down even more if they have to access the disk. Such changes are easily visible with HINT generated data.

HINT is scalable and easily portable for a variety of architectures. It can be run on anything from a programmable calculator to a supercomputer.