Benchmarking

Photo by Alex manlyx on Unsplash

Time to get the hands dirty and do some benchmarking. The goal of Lab6 is to run the different sound volume algorithms described in my last post in the five different machines and compare them.

I talked about the algorithm in the last post, so now it’s time to talk about the machines. Here they are:

	AARCHIE	BBETTY	CCHARLIE	ISRAEL	XERXES
OS	Fedora 28	Fedora 31	Fedora 30	Ubuntu 19.04	Fedora 30
Architecture	aarch64	aarch64	aarch64	aarch64	x86_64
CPU(s)	24	8	8	16	8
Thread(s) per core	1	1	1	1	2
Model name	Cortex-A53	Cortex-A57	X-Gene	Cortex-A72	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1630 v4 @ 3.70GHz
L1d cache	32K	-	unknown	32K	32K
L1i cache	32K	-	unknown	48K	32K
L2 cache	256K	-	unknown	1024K	256K
L3 cache	4096K	-	-	-	10240K

Before running anything, we need to make sure to get the time consumed by the algorithm only. So, I’ve to change the code provided to get the initial and final dates at the right time, do the elapsed time math and display it. Here is an example.

To get more accurate data possible, I choose to run each one 100 times. I also put a delay of 5 minutes between executions. Then I set to run around 10 pm to collect the data in the next morning. With the data, I extracted the average elapsed time, along with the fastest and slowest. Here is my script to do the hard work for me.

Here are the results (numbers in milliseconds):

		AARCHIE	BBETTY	CCHARLIE	ISRAEL	XERXES
Multiplication Method	Min	7571.00	933.00	1715.00	1455.00	340.00
	Max	11548.00	942.00	1722.00	1456.00	394.00
	Avg	7622.43	934.68	1716.26	1455.53	353.02
Lookup Table Method	Min	12732.00	1376.00	2220.00	2558.00	268.00
	Max	34445.00	1390.00	2574.00	2591.00	348.00
	Avg	13083.50	1379.64	2406.17	2572.67	281.33
Binary Math Method	Min	4079.00	782.00	1231.00	503.00	211.00
	Max	4442.00	795.00	1237.00	505.00	254.00
	Avg	4101.68	782.91	1232.35	503.02	218.30

We can see a difference between the algorithms. The binary math method is faster on all platforms. The surprise here is that the multiplication method performs better in aarch64 than in x86_64. And the lookup the opposite, performing better in the x86_64 than in the aarch64. However, we can't compare between machines due to incompatibility. See you!