[gentoo-soc] Benchmarking suite - Report 11

[Andrea Arteaga]

This is the report of the project "Automated benchmark suite for
numerical libraries in Gentoo" for the week 8 - 15 August.
This is also available on my blog [1].

== Project description ==

The project aims to develop a simple yet powerful automated system of
benchmarking for numerical libraries. The Gentoo software system
provides many implementations of widely used standards such as BLAS,
CBLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK and some other numerical library such as
FFTW, MKL. The developed tools will aid the system maintener to choose
the best suited implementation with respect to the machine hardware
and to test the samer implementation or different ones with different
compilers, compiler versions and compile flags.


== Progrees during the week ==

This week has been devoted to the following activities:
* documentation
* bugfix
* logging

=== Documentation ===
A man page has been written. This covers the script features, the
configuration file structure, the working directories and the module
structure. The same information is available by running the script
with the -h or –help switches. More information about each module is
available through the commands “numbench [module] -h” (or * –help).
Each module has its own printHelp() function for helping the user.
A very basic article on how to install and run the script is available
on my blog [2].

=== Bugfix ===
Some bugs have been solved in the BTL. Another bug that makes the
MFlops calculation sometimes become negative has been investigated,
but not yet solved.
More bugs have benn found in the script modules and have been solved.

=== Logging ===
The logging feature is a really important one for many reasons, and a
new important log file has been added. This one stores everything
(relevant) that the script prints on the terminal and is very useful
for those that, for instance, remotely start the execution of the
benchmarks and do not have to redirect the output somewhere anymore in
order not to lose it. The script just writes everything on the
main.log file in the log directory.

== Plan for the next weeks ==
Today was the “soft pencils down” date and, as already stated, every
relevant work has benn finished. During the next (last) week only
bugfix will be done, and some documentation added.


Best regards
Andrea Arteaga


[1] http://andyspiros.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/benchmarking-suite-report-12/
[2] http://andyspiros.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/testing-numbench/