Hello, scientific Gentoo folks! My name is Andrea Arteaga (andyspiros) and I'm doing a Google Summer of Code project on "Automated benchmark suite for numerical libraries in Gentoo" [1], with Sébastien Fabbro as mentor. As you can read, the project is about constructing a benchmarking suite for common libraries like BLAS, CBLAS, LAPACK,... Which implementation of BLAS is faster on your computer? Does ATLAS work better when compiled with gcc-4.5.2 or with some version of icc? Should you compile gsl with "-O3" or "-O2 -fexpensive-optimizations -fomit-frame-pointer -foptimize-register-move" as flags in order to reach the maximal performance? My script (is supposed to) anserws to similar questions (and many more).
At this moment, a basic benchmarking suite -- based on BTL -- is ready for BLAS, CBLAS and LAPACK implementations. Did I say "ready"? This is wrong. It still needs to be *tested*. I'm sure it is full of bugs, and I need that somebody finds them. If you are interested on helping me, please read on. The script is easy to run, but takes much computational time. The prerequisite for the tests are: * you have a Gentoo system with the bicatali overlay installed [2] * no old blas,cblas,lapack libraries are installed, i.e. you make use of the new "alternatives" eselect module * you can spend some minutes of your personal time and some houres of your machine's computational time Now, follow the how-to on my blog [3] (the blog post is in english of course, but the blog is in italian and outdated -- I'm sorry for that). Alas, only packages that have installed dependencies can be tested. So, for now, don't expect mkl to work very good (the results could be meaningless). Anyway, packages like *-reference, eigen, gsl, atlas, openblas, gotoblas2 should work well. If you run the script and find some error, bugs, problems, please send an email to me with the full report (input file, command line arguments and output). If you run it and don't find any problem, please send me an email, too! If you find that the project is interesting, but you wish some more features, please send me an email too. I don't have any bugzilla or similar system for issues, so I rely on emails. Unfortunately, I will be away for some days, so I can't answer to messages until my return; but I would appreciate very much finding the email box full of your emails, so don't hesitate! Best regards. Andrea Arteaga [1] http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/spiros/1 [2] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=dev/bicatali.git [3] http://andyspiros.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/gentoo-automated-bechmarks/
