[gentoo-soc] Benchmark suite project

[Andrea Arteaga]

Hello all.
My name is Andrea Arteaga and I'm working on the project "Automated
benchmark suite for numerical libraries in Gentoo" for this year's
Summer of Code.

Very shortly: many implementations for numerical library standards
such as BLAS, CBLAS, LAPACK, exist and are supported by Gentoo. My
project aims to construct a benchmark suite which can detect the best
suited one for the user's system and needs by performing a comparative
benchmark analysis. This will also take into account packages emerged
with special CFLAGS, FFLAGS, compilers, compiler versions...

The benchmarks will be written in C or C++, re-using existing code
when possible; the main part will consist of Python scripts. The
project design is already defined and will be the following:

* The main script will perform common tasks and will drive the user
through the different steps
* A special portage interface will use the portage APIs [I will need
soime help here, see later] in order to provide a simple way for
emerging and removing packages with special flags or environment
* An interface-dependant module will tell the portage API which
packages to emerge (e.g.: install blas-reference-20070226 using
gcc-4.5.2), use them for the benchmarks and interpret the result. At
the end it will also be responsible for a report.
* An interface-dependant benchmarks program which is coupled with the
module and will test the BLAS, CBLAS, LAPACK implementations.

The program will do operations like "CFLAGS="-O3" emerge -B
cblas-reference-20030223-r4" and similars, with some environments
changes and building binary packages in special directories. I see
that different threads already treat the portage APIs. I would like to
ask which API is the best suited for this type of operations and where
to find documentation for them (apart from pydoc).

I still don't have a git repository, which I asked Robin to set up a
few days ago, but the actual work is really starting.

--
Best
Andrea Arteaga