[Beowulf] New software for experiment management and analysis available

[Joachim Worringen]

We (NEC C&C Research Labs) have released 'perfbase' under GPL. 'perfbase' is a 
set of Python scripts (currently about 12.500 lines) which, together with a 
PostgreSQL database server, support the management and analysis of experimental 
data. In principle, it is a generic tool set, but we designed it and use it to 
track experiments from computational science and R&D, like the performance of 
MPI libraries and HPC platforms assessed by benchmarks or applications.

'perfbase' is not a tracing library, hardware counter tool or similar; it just 
takes the plain-text output files of any sort of program as input and cares for 
the consistent and automatic analysis of this data over an unlimited number of 
executions of this program, typically with differing parameters or on different 
platforms. The resulting data can be filtered, related, transformed and visualized.

'perfbase' is available via http://perfbase.tigris.org. There are some documents 
and presentation slides available, too, and the distribution archive contains a 
number of examples. There'll also be a talk on perfbase at the IEEE Cluster 
Conference in Boston (see http://www.cluster2005.org, Wednesday morning).

Feedback is most welcome, as well as contributions.

  Joachim

-- 
Joachim Worringen - NEC C&C research lab St.Augustin
fon +49-2241-9252.20 - fax .99 - http://www.ccrl-nece.de