The IPACS project (Integrated Performance Analysis of Computer Systems), which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), wants to define a new basis for measuring system performance of distributed systems. Its objective is to develop methods for measuring system performance on High Performance Computers (HPC) based on low level benchmarks, compute kernels, open source- and commercial application benchmarks. Additionally, it covers the development of methods for performance modelling and prediction of commercial codes. A further significant element is the integration into a benchmark environment consisting of a web based repository and a distributed benchmark-execution framework that ensures an easy usability and enables a just-in-time analysis of benchmark results.