Understanding the designs and performance characterizations of hot interconnects on modern data center and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters is a fruitful research topic in recent years. The rapid and continuous growth of high-bandwidth and low-latency communication requirements for various types of data center and HPC applications (such as big data, deep learning, and microservices) has been pushing the envelope of advanced interconnect designs. We believe this is high time to investigate the performance characterizations of representative hot interconnects with different benchmarks. Hence, this paper presents an extensive survey of state-of-the-art hot interconnects on data center and HPC clusters and the associated representative benchmarks to help the community to better understand modern interconnects. In addition, we characterize these interconnects by the related benchmarks under different application scenarios. We provide our perspectives on benchmarking data center interconnects based on our survey, experiments, and results.