Stress testing a PC
We’ve been working with one of our customers to roll out a small compute cluster for oceanographic modelling. The cluster consists of a series of dual processor, dual core systems. The cluster is up and running and has been generating useful data for our customer, but they have been experiencing occasional problems on one member of the cluster.
In order to investigate this problem further and isolate the cause of the problem I’ve been looking at ways to stress test the system. I’ve found memtest86+ to be pretty good at identifying problems with memory so I’ve gone and run that for a few hours and noticed no significant memory problems. After that, I’ve been looking at ways of stress testing the processors. StressCPU is one example of a program which runs some code in a loop which should show up problems when run for a period of time.
Prime95 is another interesting piece of software for stress-testing processors. The software is written for the purpose of finding Mersenne Prime numbers but turns out to be a good exerciser for the processor by virtue of the calculations it performs. It is widely used by overclockers and others intested in testing the stability of their systems and includes a mode specifically for stress testing systems which runs the program and compares the results with known good answers. The software is available for Linux and Windows and can also be found on the Ultimate Boot CD allowing it to be run on a system at boot-up.
I’ll be trying this on the system in the next few weeks and will report back on the results.
1 Comment to Stress testing a PC
[…] still using mostly the same tools for stress testing PCs as when I last wrote about this topic. memtest86+ in particular continues to be very useful. In practice, the instrumentation in most PCs […]
September 25, 2008