Testing Alto for Speed and Correctness

Testing A New Alto Execuatble for Correctness

• Create a local directory holding the files generated by the test scripts.
• set the environment variable "altotestdir" to this directory. Do not use relative paths! Avoid a trailing slash ("/") in the path! `setenv altotestdir ~user/alto/testdir'
• set the environment variable "altotestexe" to the alto binary you want to check. Do not use relative paths! `setenv altotestexe ~user/alto/new_alto' You can also specify some arguments for alto but then you have to use quotes around the file and the options. `setenv altotestexe "~user/alto/new_alto -O loop"'
• Run the test script `/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/bin/check.tcsh'

The files generated in the "altotestdir" directory are as follows (since they are often very big, the script might delete some of them):

• ".log" alto output during optimization
• ".exe" the optimized executable
• ".out" output of optimized executable on test data
• ".dif" <b>diff</b> with correct output

Testing A New Alto Execuatble for Speed

Testing alto for speed improvement works similar to the correctness test. Only a different script is used:

`/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/bin/speed.tcsh'

Instead of comparing the timings wiht the "unprocessed" versions of the programs you can specify a second alto binary in the environment variable "altotestexe2" to generate programs with.

`setenv 'altotestexe2 ~user/alto/new_alto -O loop'' This enables you to either compare different versions of alto, or the same version but with different command line options (turning particular optimizations on or off for instance.)

Running Alto without Checking

`/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/bin/nocheck.tcsh'

Running Alto to get performance counter measurements

`/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/bin/scrutinize.tcsh'

This script has not been updated recently so it might be broken. Please check ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/people/muth/pfm.tar.gz for the latest version of the pfm tool which is used by scrutinize.

Testing Only A Subset Of The Benchmarks

You can check only a subset of the benchmark suite by giving an extra argument to "check.tcsh" or speed.tcsh.

The argument is interpreted as a file name. Only those benchmarks will be used that have a file whose name matches that argument in their subdirectory.

The benchmarks reside in "/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/benchmark".

Supose you have trouble with the "go" and xlisp benchmark. Do

`touch /r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/benchmark/go/badbadbad'

`touch /r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/benchmark/xlisp/badbadbad'

Now you can use

`/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/bin/check.tcsh badbadbad'

to just check those two benchmarks.

In order to figure out what subsets have been defined already use:

`/r/sin/home/debray/ALTO/bin/info.tcsh'

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