Usage: stress [OPTION [ARG]] ...
 -?, --help         show this help statement
     --version      show version statement
 -v, --verbose      be verbose
 -q, --quiet        be quiet
 -n, --dry-run      show what would have been done
 -t, --timeout N    timeout after N seconds
     --backoff N    wait factor of N microseconds before work starts
 -c, --cpu N        spawn N workers spinning on sqrt()
 -i, --io N         spawn N workers spinning on sync()
 -m, --vm N         spawn N workers spinning on malloc()/free()
     --vm-bytes B   malloc B bytes per vm worker (default is 256MB)
     --vm-stride B  touch a byte every B bytes (default is 4096)
     --vm-hang N    sleep N secs before free (default none, 0 is inf)
     --vm-keep      redirty memory instead of freeing and reallocating
 -d, --hdd N        spawn N workers spinning on write()/unlink()
     --hdd-bytes B  write B bytes per hdd worker (default is 1GB)

Example: stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 128M --timeout 10s
Note: Numbers may be suffixed with s,m,h,d,y (time) or B,K,M,G (size).

dry run:
/garlic/apps/stress/bin/stress -c 8 -i 8 -m 1 --vm-bytes 16000M  -d 3 -n -v

nohup /garlic/apps/stress/bin/stress -c 8 -i 8 -m 1 --vm-bytes 16000M  -d 3 -t 600 -v >& stress.log &

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/stress-test-linux-unix-server-with-stress-ng/