Found this paper which I thought might interest people:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.48.9392&rep=rep1&type=pdf
“The shortage of adequate benchmarking is a major problem in the evaluation of novel production system machine organisations. This paper presents a survey of benchmark programs used in published research for improvement of production systems. We offer a new benchmark problem that allows independent variation in the size of the database, the number of productions, the ratio between local and global data, and the variance in the size of the local data clusters.”
