[R-sig-hpc] benchmark problems

[Max Kuhn]

Everyone,

We've got some big shiny new SMP machines running Cent OS. I'm trying
to convince our people that they are slow; about 2 fold slower than my
12 month old MacPro (running either Slackware or OS X).

So... to show relative/absolute differences in execution time are
there any well-known benchmarking problems that I should be using? I'd
like to cover a lot of different bases (e.g. linear algebraic
problems, memory intensive, CPU intensive, etc). We'd have to make the
usual caveats about diferences in OS's but it would be good to have
numbers.

If people have good ideas, I wouldn't mind putting a small R package
on R-Forge to make the tests easily accessible.

Thanks,

Max