Call for big benchmarks

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

Good initiative, but I guess satisfying both  "> 20KLOC"  and
"portable"  at the same time may be a tough ask.

Just a very random thought - I wonder if any insight might be gained
by crossing several of the low level together.
Like run a compute intensive benchmark at the same time as a memory
intensive benchmark?

cheers -ben

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 7:53 AM, Javier Pimás
<[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance. At present, I'm using are-we-fast-yet benchs and also smark ones, among others. Unfortunately, for some purposes those benchs are considered too low-level, so I'd like to collect a set of "real world" fat workloads. I'm asking for contributions on computing problems you have. I'll create a public repo as a common place,  explaining what each bench does, so that we can all benefit from the result.
>
> The code should have the following properties:
>
> - The executed code should be > 20KLOC.
> - It should have compute or memory intensive models or both.
> - Ideally, it has sufficient run time, perhaps a few minutes, but at least a few seconds.
> - The results should be verifiable.
> - The more portable the best, as I need to have those benchs running in another dialect.
> - Should be fully automate-able, it should be possible to suppress output.
>
>
> Some examples are moose models, source code analysis, parallelization, web apps, parser generators, their corresponding parsers, XML processing, report generation, refactoring tools, type inference, etc…
>
> Feel free to forward this mail to other lists you consider appropriate.
>
> Cheers,
> Pocho
>
> --
> Javier Pimás
> Ciudad de Buenos Aires
>

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a

frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

 

Hi Tim,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

I've discussed with Clément doing something like cloning the Opal compiler, or the Squeak compiler, so that it uses a fixed set of classes that won't change over time, excepting the collections, and using as a benchmark this compiler recompiling all its own methods.  This is a nice mix of string processing (in the tokenizer) and symbolic processing (in the building and optimizing of the parse tree).

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

Again, extracting a compiler from its host system would make it possible to maintain a cross-platform version.  It could be left as an exercise to the reader to port it to one's favorite non-Smalltalk dynamic language. 

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

--

_,,,^..^,,,_

best, Eliot

 
Hi Eliot, 

the question for me is, how indicative is this workload of real world performance? Creating compiled methods may not be something that is highly optimized, simply because it doesn't need to be in real applications. One would have to be careful about what is being measured, or if the benchmark is just measuring how fast we can blow out the caches... 

If we're just talking about running parsing and optimizing something, then maybe some real world applications are using that, but even then some JSON or HTML parsing library that implements e.g. Apache mod_rewrite would be more realistic, I think. Dynamically parsing and patching HTML and then pretty-printing or minimizing it seems a more common problem.

I know, you're trying to argue that the Opal compiler may show common workloads equally well, but we could argue that for some of the Shootout benchmarks, too. It's an argument that doesn't seem to convince some people.

Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> schrieb am Do., 23. März 2017, 17:18:

 

Hi Tim,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

I've discussed with Clément doing something like cloning the Opal compiler, or the Squeak compiler, so that it uses a fixed set of classes that won't change over time, excepting the collections, and using as a benchmark this compiler recompiling all its own methods.  This is a nice mix of string processing (in the tokenizer) and symbolic processing (in the building and optimizing of the parse tree).

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

Again, extracting a compiler from its host system would make it possible to maintain a cross-platform version.  It could be left as an exercise to the reader to port it to one's favorite non-Smalltalk dynamic language.

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

--

_,,,^..^,,,_

best, Eliot

 
Hi Eliot, 

the question for me is, how indicative is this workload of real world performance? Creating compiled methods may not be something that is highly optimized, simply because it doesn't need to be in real applications. One would have to be careful about what is being measured, or if the benchmark is just measuring how fast we can blow out the caches... 

If we're just talking about running parsing and optimizing something, then maybe some real world applications are using that, but even then some JSON or HTML parsing library that implements e.g. Apache mod_rewrite would be more realistic, I think. Dynamically parsing and patching HTML and then pretty-printing or minimizing it seems a more common problem.

I know, you're trying to argue that the Opal compiler may show common workloads equally well, but we could argue that for some of the Shootout benchmarks, too. It's an argument that doesn't seem to convince some people.

Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> schrieb am Do., 23. März 2017, 17:18:

 

Hi Tim,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

I've discussed with Clément doing something like cloning the Opal compiler, or the Squeak compiler, so that it uses a fixed set of classes that won't change over time, excepting the collections, and using as a benchmark this compiler recompiling all its own methods.  This is a nice mix of string processing (in the tokenizer) and symbolic processing (in the building and optimizing of the parse tree).

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

Again, extracting a compiler from its host system would make it possible to maintain a cross-platform version.  It could be left as an exercise to the reader to port it to one's favorite non-Smalltalk dynamic language.

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

--

_,,,^..^,,,_

best, Eliot

 

I don't know if this qualifies, but I ported John Walker's fbench floating point accuracy benchmark (https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/fbench.html) to a variety of Smalltalk platforms. The numerical code is written in the standard Numerical Recipes style, which isn't very Smalltalky, but is very common. Probably lots of opportunities for optimizations. The included code tries to write to stdout as it was designed to be called from the command line, but that is pretty trivial to change.

Cheers,

 -  John

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 1:10 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 
Hi Eliot, 

the question for me is, how indicative is this workload of real world performance? Creating compiled methods may not be something that is highly optimized, simply because it doesn't need to be in real applications. One would have to be careful about what is being measured, or if the benchmark is just measuring how fast we can blow out the caches... 

If we're just talking about running parsing and optimizing something, then maybe some real world applications are using that, but even then some JSON or HTML parsing library that implements e.g. Apache mod_rewrite would be more realistic, I think. Dynamically parsing and patching HTML and then pretty-printing or minimizing it seems a more common problem.

I know, you're trying to argue that the Opal compiler may show common workloads equally well, but we could argue that for some of the Shootout benchmarks, too. It's an argument that doesn't seem to convince some people.

Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> schrieb am Do., 23. März 2017, 17:18:

 

Hi Tim,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

I've discussed with Clément doing something like cloning the Opal compiler, or the Squeak compiler, so that it uses a fixed set of classes that won't change over time, excepting the collections, and using as a benchmark this compiler recompiling all its own methods.  This is a nice mix of string processing (in the tokenizer) and symbolic processing (in the building and optimizing of the parse tree).

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

Again, extracting a compiler from its host system would make it possible to maintain a cross-platform version.  It could be left as an exercise to the reader to port it to one's favorite non-Smalltalk dynamic language.

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

--

_,,,^..^,,,_

best, Eliot

--

John Dougan
[hidden email]

Hi John,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 7:29 PM, John Dougan <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

I don't know if this qualifies, but I ported John Walker's fbench floating point accuracy benchmark (https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/fbench.html) to a variety of Smalltalk platforms. The numerical code is written in the standard Numerical Recipes style, which isn't very Smalltalky, but is very common. Probably lots of opportunities for optimizations. The included code tries to write to stdout as it was designed to be called from the command line, but that is pretty trivial to change.

I'd love to see this contributed.  How old is that page? 

I'm curious about these relative results:

C 1 GCC 3.2.3 -O3, Linux

...

Smalltalk 7.59 GNU Smalltalk 2.3.5, Linux

I'd like to see if Spur Cog can beat VW and Gnu St.

 

Cheers,

 -  John

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 1:10 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 
Hi Eliot, 

the question for me is, how indicative is this workload of real world performance? Creating compiled methods may not be something that is highly optimized, simply because it doesn't need to be in real applications. One would have to be careful about what is being measured, or if the benchmark is just measuring how fast we can blow out the caches... 

If we're just talking about running parsing and optimizing something, then maybe some real world applications are using that, but even then some JSON or HTML parsing library that implements e.g. Apache mod_rewrite would be more realistic, I think. Dynamically parsing and patching HTML and then pretty-printing or minimizing it seems a more common problem.

I know, you're trying to argue that the Opal compiler may show common workloads equally well, but we could argue that for some of the Shootout benchmarks, too. It's an argument that doesn't seem to convince some people.

Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> schrieb am Do., 23. März 2017, 17:18:

 

Hi Tim,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Tim Felgentreff <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Yes, big benchmarks would be nice. Those on speed.squeak.org or in VMMaker are all somewhat small.

Note the Ruby community, for example, has benchmarks such as a NES emulator (optcarrot) that can run for a few thousand frames with predefined input as benchmarks. It's definitely possible.

Maybe some of the projects from HPI students could be made to work, there was a Chip8 emulator in Squeak, for example, that seems big enough. Or maybe the DCPU emulator at github.com/fniephaus/BroDCPU without a frame limit would work as a decent CPU bound benchmark.

I've discussed with Clément doing something like cloning the Opal compiler, or the Squeak compiler, so that it uses a fixed set of classes that won't change over time, excepting the collections, and using as a benchmark this compiler recompiling all its own methods.  This is a nice mix of string processing (in the tokenizer) and symbolic processing (in the building and optimizing of the parse tree).

Cross - dialect could be hard. Pharo and Squeak are fairly easy to do, but with larger programs staying compatible across different dialects is harder.

Again, extracting a compiler from its host system would make it possible to maintain a cross-platform version.  It could be left as an exercise to the reader to port it to one's favorite non-Smalltalk dynamic language.

tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> schrieb am Mi., 22. März 2017, 21:40:

> On 21-03-2017, at 4:53 PM, Javier Pimás <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody! While measuring performance I usually face the problem of assessing performance.

Have you tried the benchmarks package - CogBenchmarks - included in the source.squeak.org/VMMaker repository?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: BOMB: Burn Out Memory Banks

--

_,,,^..^,,,_

best, Eliot

--

John Dougan
[hidden email]

--

_,,,^..^,,,_

best, Eliot