  Benchmarking of CPU resources in WLCG has been based on the HEP-SPEC06 (HS06)
suite for over a decade. It has recently become clear that HS06, which is based
on real applications from non-HEP domains, no longer describes typical HEP
workloads. The aim of the HEP-Benchmarks project is to develop a new benchmark
suite for WLCG compute resources, based on real applications from the LHC
experiments. By construction, these new benchmarks are thus guaranteed to have
a score highly correlated to the throughputs of HEP applications, and a CPU
usage pattern similar to theirs. Linux containers and the CernVM-FS filesystem
are the two main technologies enabling this approach, which had been considered
impossible in the past. In this paper, we review the motivation, implementation
and outlook of the new benchmark suite.
