I'd like to run some minimum-expectation benchmarks on EC2, but I'm having an issue of high variability in my output data. Specifically, they keep giving me more CPU than I'm minimally entitled to, which is killing my ability to evaluate minimum performance when I'm only receiving my minimal CPU allocation. So the question is...does anyone know a way to limit the CPU cycles available to the entire OS? I'm looking at Debian-based systems, so primarily Ubuntu. I've tried modifying the governor (no luck) and there's no access to Xen config (not that it would help) or the BIOS. All other solutions are either percentage (cpulimit, cgroups) or time (ulimit) based and therefore won't work. 
Limit CPU cycles inside of Xen
linux;cpu;xen;limit;amazon ec2