As June is coming to a close, useful to take stock of what is completed and what still remains.

During June, the following were done:

1. Phoronix benchmark list: I finished going through ~120 Phoronix benchmarks to at least do a “topdown” run. Approximately 60 have further “analysis” pages. Most of this was done by end of May, but finished the last at start of the month. As a result, when benchmark articles are posted, most of these I’ve already looked at and it is quicker to update the analysis.
2. Phoronix articles: looked at articles on OS comparisons, CPU comparison and hyper-threading. Updated article based on previous analysis. Hyper-threading was most interesting, showing these smaller benchmarks all benefited unless there was obvious cause, e.g. limited thread scaling. Skipped over some OS-specific articles as I’ve looked at the benchmarks and not sure much more to add.
3. Installed and analyzed both gromacs and OpenFoam applications. Nice to see tools created based on smaller benchmarks can work here.
4. Added support to wspy for –memstats. This periodically samples /proc/meminfo and creates metrics. Useful for OpenFOAM
5. Looked further at OpenSSL differences between AMD and Intel and suggested perhaps MULX instructions were related.
6. Looked at topdown metrics for AMD, but not much traction here.

This leaves several areas for further emphasis in the future(*):

1. Add additional “real world” codes. Top candidates are wrf and namd.
2. Keep up with incremental phoronix articles as they are published.
3. Look at Ryzen to create better “topdown” quick tool, e.g. add cache miss rates. It might become more of an overall tool than top down.
4. Add ARMv8 architecture examples.
5. Cleanups: take care of nmi timer, add “about this graph”, review test next steps
6. Implement –netstats, the one remaining “stats” feature. However, don’t have a motivating case yet
7. Look at tools/techniques beyond current measurements, e.g. microbenchmark measurements similar to Agner’s scripts?

I have some extended cycle touring scheduled in July, so may be slower month overall. However, also reached a general level of maturity on tools and analysis that more about rounding out edges.