Towards continuous benchmarking: An automated performance evaluation framework for high performance software

We present an automated performance evaluation framework that enables an automated workflow for testing and performance evaluation of software libraries. Integrating this component into an ecosystem enables sustainable software development, as a community effort, via a web application for interactively evaluating the performance of individual software components. The performance evaluation tool is based exclusively on web technologies, which removes the burden of downloading performance data or installing additional software. We employ this framework for the Ginkgo software ecosystem, but the framework can be used with essentially any software project, including the comparison between different software libraries. The Continuous Integration (CI) framework of Ginkgo is also extended to automatically run a benchmark suite on predetermined HPC systems, store the state of the machine and the environment along with the compiled binaries, and collect results in a publicly accessible performance data repository based on Git. The Ginkgo performance explorer (GPE) can be used to retrieve the performance data from the repository, and visualizes it in a web browser. GPE also implements an interface that allows users to write scripts, archived in a Git repository, to extract particular data, compute particular metrics, and visualize them in many different formats (as specified by the script). The combination of these approaches creates a workflow which enables performance reproducibility and software sustainability of scientific software. In this paper, we present example scripts that extract and visualize performance data for Ginkgo’s SpMV kernels that allow users to identify the optimal kernel for specific problem characteristics.