Torsken Beta 3 Brings More OpenCL Benchmarks, Etc

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 24 August 2010 at 09:31 AM EDT. 2 Comments
PHORONIX
Last week when releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta 2 I anticipated it being the last development release for this next major update to the Phoronix Test Suite that's codenamed Torsken, but things have changed. Due to a number of commits over the past week bringing both bug-fixes, new test profiles, and some minor feature enhancements, a third beta release has been made available and the final Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 release is expected to follow next week.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta 3 switches tests that use an integrated timer mechanism for producing a result (i.e. measuring the time to completing a ray-tracing task or how long it takes the Linux kernel to compile) to using a new timing framework that's exposed over the XML parsing interface that was introduced with the Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 "Lyngen" release. There's also new system monitoring capabilities exposed through this XML results parsing interface.

Torsken Beta 3 also has more internal changes to pts-core for getting a jump-start on some of the planned PTS3 features, improved external dependency handling on unsupported operating systems / Linux distributions, and attempts to avoid the use of KDE's Konqueror due to its poor XSL handling with the PTS Results Viewer.

Perhaps most exciting with this third and final beta for end-users are the new test profiles. While there's been PyOpenCL test profile in the Phoronix Test Suite and another OpenCL / ATI Stream test profile in development by AMD, in Beta 3 are a handful of more Open Computing Language tests for Linux, Mac OS X, and will eventually be supported on Windows too. These new test profiles include JuliaGPU, MandelGPU, SmallPT-GPU, and MandelbulbGPU. An OpenCL test suite has also been added. Though there may be further refinements to these tests before Torsken is officially released, but yes, the addition of these test profiles does mean at Phoronix we have plans for some interesting OpenCL benchmarks coming soon.

Grab the latest Phoronix Test Suite release at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com and give it a run before the final release that's expected next Tuesday, the 31st of August.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta 3
August 24, 2010


- pts-core: When the NVIDIA driver is loaded, better recognize when the GPU is overclocked by the user
- pts-core: Unless a test is using an integrated timer, it must specify a parse-results.xml file even if the log file is just the result to be parsed
- pts-core: Provide clean system monitoring capabilities through the parse-results.xml interface
- pts-core: Replace TIMER_START and TIMER_STOP integrated timer functionality by exposing sys.time in the results parsing interface
- pts-core: Transition pts_result_file_result object to using pts_test_result
- pts-core: Transition pts_test_run_request to use the pts_test_result object
- pts-core: Improve external dependency handling on unsupported operating systems / distributions
- pts-core: Try to avoid using Konqueror for displaying test results as its bad with XSL
- pts-core: Drop analyze-result-file command since its capabilities are to be in the PTS Results Viewer itself
- pts: Add juliagpu OpenCL test
- pts: Add mandelgpu OpenCL test
- pts: Add smallpt-gpu OpenCL test
- pts: Add mandelbulbgpu OpenCL test
- pts: Add opencl test suite
- pts: Update dead download links in several test profiles
- documentation: Add note that PHP PCNTL support is required now for many tests
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week