jBM – a CPU benchmarking tool for cloud environments

Cloud computing is an ever growing reality nowadays. The possibility of leasing and provisioning resources is an important alternative to the construction of dedicated data centers. At the same time, multi-core and many-core architectures are becoming more and more popular and widely available. However, such architectures present several challenges due to their high complexity. In particular it is essential to be able to study, test, model and simulate various aspects of these new environments, with suitable tools. In this paper we present jBM, a simple tool for the benchmarking the CPU of new architectures like multi-core or cloud systems. The tool consists of a multi-class workload generator and service centers that can be distributed along different nodes. The applicability of the tool is proven through several applications to evaluate the performance of virtual machines on Amazon EC2.