A Platform Independent Tool for Evaluating Performance of Computing Equipment for a Computer Laboratory

Designing computing equipment for a computer laboratory is not easy. In a class in a computer laboratory, it is not unusual that all students do the same thing simultaneously. Tremendous traffic is on the network and heavy load is on the file server or the web server at that time. In order to design the equipment, it is useful if we can have performance data which is acquired in a real class. And it is more useful if we can compare the performance data of various kind of equipment which is acquired by doing the same operations in a real class. In order to acquire such kind of data, we are developing a benchmark test tool for distributed systems. This tool records real operations by users on computing equipment and it acquires its performance data. The tool can replay the same operations on different computing equipment. The tool can also let every computer doing the same thing simultaneously. In order to compare the performance data of various kind of computing equipment, this tool is in Java. So it is platform independent. We show the structure of the tool and the experiment of the usage of the tool