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Benchmarks

This article is about the use of benchmarks in computing, for other uses see benchmark (disambiguation). In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. The term 'benchmark' is also mostly utilized for the purposes of elaborately-designed benchmarking programs themselves. Benchmarking is usually associated with assessing performance characteristics of computer hardware, for example, the floating point operation performance of a CPU, but there are circumstances when the technique is also applicable to software. Software benchmarks are, for example, run against compilers or database management systems. Benchmarks provide a method of comparing the performance of various subsystems across different chip/system architectures. Test suites are a type of system intended to assess the correctness of software.