- A warm up run is done and not timed to allow for any allocation of room for output data without accounting for it in the run times. Previously this time spent allocating memory would be included in the time we measured for the benchmark. - Benchmarks are run multiple times and we then compute some statistics about the run time of the benchmark to give a better picture of the expected run time of the function. To this end we run the benchmark either 500 times or for 1.5s, whichever comes sooner (though these are easily changeable). We then perform outlier limiting by Winsorising the data (similar to how Rust's benchmarking library works) and print out the median, mean, min and max run times along with the median absolute deviation and standard deviation. - Because benchmarks are run many times they can now perform some initial setup in the constructor, eg. to fill some test input data array with values to let the main benchmark loop run faster. - To allow for benchmarks to have members of the data type being benchmarked the struct must now be templated on this type, leading to a bit of awkwardness. I've worked around this by adding the `VTKM_MAKE_BENCHMARK` and `VTKM_RUN_BENCHMARK` macros, the make benchmark macro generates a struct that has an `operator()` templated on the value type which will construct and return the benchmark functor templated on that type. The run macro will then use this generated struct to run the benchmark functor on the type list passed. You can also pass arguments to the benchmark functor's constructor through the make macro however this makes things more awkward because the name of the MakeBench struct must be different for each variation of constructor arguments (for example see `BenchLowerBounds`). - Added a short comment on how to add benchmarks in `vtkm/benchmarking/Benchmarker.h` as the new system is a bit different from how the tests work. - You can now pass an extra argument when running the benchmark suite to only benchmark specific functions, eg. `Benchmarks_TBB BenchmarkDeviceAdapter ScanInclusive Sort` will only benchmark ScanInclusive and Sort. Running without any extra arguments will run all the benchmarks as before. |
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CMake | ||
docs | ||
vtkm | ||
CMakeLists.txt | ||
CTestConfig.cmake | ||
LICENSE.txt | ||
README.md |
VTK-m
One of the biggest recent changes in high-performance computing is the increasing use of accelerators. Accelerators contain processing cores that independently are inferior to a core in a typical CPU, but these cores are replicated and grouped such that their aggregate execution provides a very high computation rate at a much lower power. Current and future CPU processors also require much more explicit parallelism. Each successive version of the hardware packs more cores into each processor, and technologies like hyperthreading and vector operations require even more parallel processing to leverage each core’s full potential.
VTK-m is a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for emerging processor architectures. VTK-m supports the fine-grained concurrency for data analysis and visualization algorithms required to drive extreme scale computing by providing abstract models for data and execution that can be applied to a variety of algorithms across many different processor architectures.
Getting VTK-m
The VTK-m repository is located at https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk-m
VTK-m dependencies are:
- CMake 3.0
- Boost 1.52.0 or greater
- Cuda Toolkit 6+ or Thrust 1.7+
git clone https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk-m.git vtkm
mkdir vtkm-build
cd vtkm-build
cmake-gui ../vtkm
A detailed walk-through of installing and building VTK-m can be found on our Contributing page