Post

System Test Refactor

Testing

After getting feedback on the testing system last week I refactored the entire system testing function into a class with substantially expanded functionality. This was really helpful and made the tool a lot more expandable for future work. It did make it harder to implement MPI tests but the additional functionality of the class should allow me to do more complex MPI tests in the long run. As part of the refactor I added a bunch of utility methods for setting fiducial data, time step number, choosing what to test, etc. I tried to set it up such that any new fiducial data arrays would be saved as HDF5 files for later manual comparison if needed but the HDF5 C++ API is difficult and annoying to use so I decided to postpone that until someone needs it. The new class has lots of doxygen comments and there is documentation in the wiki of my fork of Cholla

Performance Timing

I wanted to examing the performance characteristics of the system test so I reran the system test 1,000 times and got these results:

SectionAverage TimeMinimum TimeMaximum Time
Cholla Run1.06028 s487.683 ms1.67028 s
Total Time1.07490 s494.208 ms1.69090 s
Non-Cholla Time1.462 ms6.525 ms2.062 ms

All in all it came out to about 1.4 \( \mu s\) per cell. That’s with a lot of overhead in the form of class instantiation, array allocation, etc that either wouldn’t exist in an MPI test or can be optimized away.

Automated Testing

Automated testing, and general portability, might require us to be able to build and link to GoogleTest without relying on the system to already have it installed. I wrote a script to do that and set up the various make.host files to use a user installed version of GoogleTest over the system installed one. I’m getting some library linking issues on the Pitt H2P cluster but it works on Summit, Spock, and C-3PO (Evan’s computer).

Other

  • Modified run_tests script to automatically choose machine name and launch command based on the hostname.
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