These benchmarks should only be used for prototyping, and not for performance measurements. Please see the DaCapo Benchmarks which we recommend for performance measurements.
The original Olden benchmarks are a suite of pointer intensive C programs. The benchmarks were used by Martin Carlisle and Anne Rogers for evaluating a system that parallelizes programs with dynamic data structures. The original sources are located at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mcc/olden_benchmarks.tar.Z.
Members of the Architecture and Language Implementation Laboratory (http://ali-www.cs.umass.edu) rewrote the C programs in Java. Since the original version of the benchmarks use parallel constructs, we first made the programs sequential before translating them to into Java.
Please cite the following paper if you use these benchmarks in a publication:
Data Flow Analysis for Software Prefetching Linked Data Structures in Java ftp://ftp.cs.umass.edu/pub/osl/papers/pact01-prefetch.ps.gz, B. Cahoon and K. S. McKinley, International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), Barcelona Spain, September 2001.