A small, fixed, and purely synthetic workload used to calibrate the benchmark results.
Publishing its runtime alongside the real measurements allows a viewer to normalize the other numbers by it,
and hence to cancel out how fast or how loaded the machine was that produced them.
The workload must therefore stay deterministic (no file system, no R session, no randomness)
and cheap (well below a second).
A small, fixed, and purely synthetic workload used to calibrate the benchmark results.
Publishing its runtime alongside the real measurements allows a viewer to normalize the other numbers by it, and hence to cancel out how fast or how loaded the machine was that produced them. The workload must therefore stay deterministic (no file system, no R session, no randomness) and cheap (well below a second).