Quick Benchmark
We had a local scientist who'd heard we had an O200 with an R12K processor; he asked if he could benchmark a small code on it.
It turned out the code was Fortran, which we do not have on any of our Probe platforms. But it was a small code, easily translated (by Dan Million) to C. It was successfully run.
When the scientist heard we also had an alpha and an RS/6000 he wanted to run the benchmark code there as well. We did so.
This was far from a definitive test. The customer wasn't interested in optimization comparisons or any real detailed studies; he only wanted a quick comparison. The entire exercise took less than an hour.
Such a minor activity would ordinarily be unworthy of note, except that the fact that the machines were present made the testing possible to do - serendipitously and conveniently.
[Incidentally, the Compaq Alpha was fastest.]