This is a clever parallel threading benchmark written by John Tsiombikas in 2006 and released under the GPL v 2. It renders a scene, creating a bitmap image. Ian Mapleson has been charting the speed of different computers on this benchmark for many years. This simple program compiles on many computer architectures, allowing you to see how a recent (as of 2022) Intel Alderlake or Apple M1 Pro compares to a vintage Silicon Graphics 32 core computer. The rendering is an embarrassingly_parallel task, so it performs dramatically faster with multiple threads. The included text file README.txt includes additional details.
Running the benchmark should be simple for most Linux computers with a c compiler installed:
git clone https://github.com/neurolabusc/c-ray.git
cd c-ray
make
./RUN.full