Faculty Advisor
Prof. John M. Rulnick
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering and
Dept. of Computer Science

Grant
$9,800 on 9/1/98

Funding
Performance Benchmarks Project
While the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems presently dominates the desktop computing market, the powerful and free GNU/Linux operating system continues to draw new users. Linux is estimated to have about 7.5 million users presently (fall, 1998), with the number of users approximately doubling each year. According to industry projections, Linux is the only desktop OS not in the Windows family that will gain market share over the next five years. The purpose of the project is to develop an application benchmark system for Linux similar to PC World's main benchmark for Windows systems, WorldBench 98. WorldBench measures performance of systems running automated scripts for six popular business applications (two word processors, two spreadsheets, one database, and one graphics publishing). The main difference for this project, apart from the underlying OS, is that the Linux benchmarks will be reflective of the generally greater versatility of UNIX systems.

Current Status as of 2/99
Not yet underway.