The AIM Multiuser Benchmark, also called the AIM Benchmark Suite VII or AIM7, is a job throughput benchmark widely used by

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

computer system vendors. Current research operating systems such as

K42 K42 is a discontinued open-source research operating system (OS) for cache-coherent 64-bit multiprocessor systems. It was developed primarily at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in collaboration with the University of Toronto and University ...

use the ''reaim'' form of the benchmark for performance analysis. The AIM7 benchmark measures some of the same things as the SDET benchmark. The original code was developed by Gene Dronek for AIM Technology, Inc., who licensed it to others. The first AIM Benchmarks were for single user PCs. The suite was expanded and enhanced to become multi-user benchmarks by Donald Steiny.

Caldera International, Inc. Caldera International, Inc., earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products. Caldera Systems was created in August 1998 as a spinoff ...

, bought the license and released the source code for Suite VII and Suite IX under the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. AIM7 is a program written in C that forks many processes called tasks, each of which concurrently runs in random order a set of subtests called jobs. There are 53 kinds of jobs, each of which exercises a different aspect of the operating system, such as disk-file operations, process creation, user virtual memory operations, pipe I/O, and compute-bound arithmetic loops . Filesystem Performance and Scalability in Linux 2.4.17, Ray Bryant, 2002, USENIX 2002 Annual Technical Conference, Freenix Track
An AIM7 benchmark run is composed of a sequence of subruns with the number of tasks incrementing by one between each subrun. Each subrun goes until each of its tasks has completed its set of jobs. Each subrun reports a metric of jobs completed per minute, with the final report for the overall benchmark being a table of that throughput metric versus number of tasks. A given system will have a peak number of tasks N at which the jobs per minute is maximized. Either N or the value of the jobs per minute at N is typically used as the metric of interest.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aim Multiuser Benchmark Benchmarks (computing)