User:Ankeshanand/GSoC14/proposal

Personal Information

---

Name	Ankesh Anand
Email Address	ankeshanand1994@gmail.com
IRC(nick)	ankesh11
Phone Number	+91 8348522098
Time Zone	UTC +0530

Project Information

---

Project Title

Benchmark Performance Database

Abstract

BRL-CAD Benchmark Suite has been used over the years to analyse and compare a system's performance based on certain parameters. The goal of this project is to deploy a database and visualization website that provides multiple mechanisms to add new benchmark logs into the database and provide various forms of visualizations for the aggregate data.

Detailed Project Description

A Diagrammatic Overview

Benchmark Runs produce a log-file which contains the results of the ray-tracing program on a bunch of sample databases, along with a linear performance metric, system state information and system CPU information. These log-files then need to be uploaded to a server via multiple mechanisms such as Email(Mail server), FTP, scp and an http API.There a parser reads the information from the log-file and subsequently stores it into a database. The database schema is ideally designed to index all the information in the log-file. The front-end pulls the aggregate data from the database and displays it in forms of various plots and tables. There is also a file upload mechanism via the web front-end as well as a search functionality which enables searches filtered to parameters such as machine descriptions, versions, results etc.

The current status of the Project

There was an earlier GSoC project[1] which did a nice job of building a robust parser and capturing all the relevant information into the database. I plan to leverage the parser and database modules. The front-end is buily using the Python Bottle Framework and it Google Charts Library which is not robust for data-visualizations. I feel I could be more productive if I start my implementation of front-end from scratch, the details of which are highlighted in further sections.

Mechanisms for Upload

• Emails

The current de-facto standard to submit the benchmark results is to send an email to benchmark@brlcad.org. Any approach to build a benchmark performance database must cater and support parsing of emails to retrieve the attached logs. Keeping this in mind, I have decided to use the php-mime-mail-parser[1] library, which is a wrapper around PHP's Mail Parser extension to parse and extract attachments from the mails. It's fast and has an easy implementation:

   // require mime parser library
   require_once('MimeMailParser.class.php');
   // instantiate the mime parser
   $Parser = new MimeMailParser();
   // set the email text for parsing
   $Parser->setText($text);
   // get attachments
   $attachments = $Parser->getAttachments();

• Drag-n-Drop Files

The front-end will provide a convenient interface to upload log-files with a drag-n-drop support. An uploader script based on HTTP POST will handle the implementation details, and the drag and drop feature can be realized using the DropzoneJS[2] library. This also means the file can be sent with a command line tool such as curl.

• FTP

The files can also be uploaded to the server via a FTP client. A cron-job keeps checking for new files on the server at a regular frequency(say 5mins), and then subsequently sends them for parsing.