Why do we Need a Benchmark?
Benchmarks are useful, quick tools for measuring the perfomance of a
given system. While they certainly do not provide an absolute measurement of all
of the capabilities of the system, they do provide useful information. For
instance, measuring a car's acceleration time from 0 mph to 60 mph is not
necessarily the best way to determine its performance; however, it does provide a
good reference point for comparisions. A few things which must be kept in mind
when developing a benchmark of any kind is that it must be (1) easy to perform,
(2) accurate, and (3) reproducable. Since area detectors have become one of
the dominant methods employed for solving protein structures in many
macromolecular crystallography laboratories we thought it would be useful to
develop a method for benchmarking these detectors. We have developed such a
benchmark based on peak heights measured on anomalous difference Pattersons.
More information is available
about the benchmark.
Return to Area Detector Benchmarking Home Page.