coNCePTuaL News

coNCePTuaL v1.5.1 is now available for download from SourceForge. The coNCePTuaL toolset generates executable code from a graphical or textual description of a network-communication pattern and makes it easy to quantify the performance of that communication pattern when executed on a parallel computer or workstation cluster. This latest release fixes an egregious bug so upgrading is highly recommended.

coNCePTuaL v1.5 is now available for download from SourceForge. The coNCePTuaL toolset generates executable code from a graphical or textual description of a network-communication pattern and makes it easy to quantify the performance of that communication pattern when executed on a parallel computer or workstation cluster. The latest release adds numerous features to the language, including functions for accessing external data files, functions for mapping between virtual and physical task numbers, a function for computing percentiles on measurement data, and the ability to apply multiple aggregation functions in turn to a single expression. Timed for loops now support specified warmup times. Some new syntactic sugar makes it even easier to specify lists of tasks.... read more

coNCePTuaL v1.4 is now available for download from SourceForge. The coNCePTuaL toolset generates executable code from a graphical or textual description of a network-communication pattern and makes it easy to quantify the performance of that communication pattern when executed on a parallel computer or workstation cluster. The latest release adds some major new features to the language, including list comprehensions and tag matching of messages.... read more

coNCePTuaL v1.3 is now available for download from SourceForge. The coNCePTuaL toolset generates executable code from a graphical or textual description of a network-communication pattern and makes it easy to quantify the performance of that communication pattern when executed on a parallel computer or workstation cluster. The latest release adds some major new features, including two new compiler back ends, a more flexible RECEIVE statement, the ability to let-bind sets of tasks to an identifier for later use (and re-use), and the ability to compute coordinates, neighbor sets, and distances on 1-D/2-D/3-D meshes, tori, and now partial tori.... read more

coNCePTuaL v1.2 is now available for download from SourceForge. The coNCePTuaL toolset generates executable code from a graphical or textual description of a network-communication pattern and makes it easy to quantify the performance of that communication pattern when executed on a parallel computer or workstation cluster. The latest release introduces a few new statements to the coNCePTuaL specification language, improves a couple of the command-line tools, includes two new sample coNCePTuaL programs, and fixes some major bugs that somehow snuck into the code.... read more

coNCePTuaL v1.1 is now available for download from SourceForge. The
coNCePTuaL toolset generates executable code from a graphical or
textual description of a network-communication pattern and makes it
easy to quantify the performance of that communication pattern when
executed on a parallel computer or workstation cluster. Parallel
programs produced by coNCePTuaL v1.1 have recently run successfully
across all 147,456 cores of LLNL's new IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer,
Dawn.... read more

coNCePTuaL v1.0 has finally been released and is available for
download from SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open
source to tests of network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes
it easy to develop customized network tests that other people can
readily understand, reproduce, and modify. This is an important
capability when analyzing the performance of large workstation
clusters and parallel supercomputers.... read more

The October 2007 issue of the prestigious IEEE Transactions on
Parallel and Distributed Systems includes a technical paper on
coNCePTuaL. The paper is entitled "The Design and Implementation of a
Domain-Specific Language for Network Performance Testing" and is
available for download from the coNCePTuaL Web site
(http://conceptual.sourceforge.net/) via the "Documentation" button.
The following is a direct link:
http://www.c3.lanl.gov/PAL/publications/papers/Pakin2007:conc-design.pdf... read more

coNCePTuaL was used to help evaluate the various proposals for Los
Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)'s $110M "Roadrunner" supercomputer
procurement. Prospective vendors were instructed to install
coNCePTuaL from its SourceForge project page, run a suite of network
performance tests on their largest available Roadrunner-like system,
and provide LANL with the resulting coNCePTuaL log files. This
approach turned out to be extremely useful to LANL because the
Laboratory was able to discern exactly how each benchmark was run,
which helped explain discrepancies in performance across seemingly
similar vendor configurations.... read more

coNCePTuaL v0.8.1 has been released and is available for download from
SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of
network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to develop
customized network tests that other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and parallel
supercomputers.... read more

The home page for the coNCePTuaL project
(http://conceptual.sourceforge.net/) has been completely redesigned.
There is now a lot more information available, including more thorough
examples of how to write and run coNCePTuaL programs. Also, the
coNCePTuaL User's Guide is now online in HTML format for more
convenient browsing.

In short, coNCePTuaL is a language-centric toolset that makes it easy
to develop customized network tests that other people can readily
understand, reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability
when analyzing the performance of large workstation clusters and
parallel supercomputers.... read more

coNCePTuaL v0.8 has been released and is available for download from
SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of
network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to develop
customized network tests that other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and parallel
supercomputers. ... read more

coNCePTuaL v0.7.2 has been released and is available for download from
SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of
network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to develop
customized network tests that other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and parallel
supercomputers.... read more

coNCePTuaL v0.7.1 has been released and is available for download from
SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of
network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to produce
customized network tests which other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and parallel
supercomputers.... read more

coNCePTuaL v0.7 has been released and is available for download from
SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of
network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to produce
customized network tests which other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and supercomputers.... read more

coNCePTuaL v0.6.5 has been released and is available for download from
SourceForge. coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of
network performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to produce
customized network tests which other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and supercomputers.... read more

coNCePTuaL brings the notion of open source to tests of network
performance. The coNCePTuaL toolset makes it easy to produce
customized network tests which other people can readily understand,
reproduce, and modify. This is an important capability when analyzing
the performance of large workstation clusters and supercomputers.

Version 0.6.4 of coNCePTuaL introduces a few features which make it
more convenient to run on large-scale systems. (coNCePTuaL has
recently been run extensively on the 10,368-CPU Red Storm
supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories and before that on the
65,536-CPU BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.) Primarily, however, coNCePTuaL 0.6.4 focuses on
improving portability, cleaning up the build process, and fixing
various minor bugs.... read more

coNCePTuaL is a language-based tool which facilitates the rapid
development of portable+readable+reproducible performance tests for
cluster and parallel-computer networks. In coNCePTuaL v0.6.3, log
files are now more robust to machine crashes and killed processes
while still supporting two-dimensional access to the data rows and
columns. (The trick is to periodically flush the log then rewind the
write pointer.)... read more

coNCePTuaL is a language-based tool which facilitates the rapid
development of portable+readable+reproducible performance tests for
cluster and parallel-computer networks. coNCePTuaL v0.6.2a corrects
the build process for the interpreter, which was seriously broken
during a last-minute change made before releasing version 0.6.2. A
few minor bugs have been fixed as well. Also, the logmerge script has
been enhanced to be able to merge tens of thousands of log files --
useful when running on a system containing tens of thousands of CPUs
(e.g., LLNL's BlueGene/L system).... read more

coNCePTuaL is a tool which facilitates the rapid development of
performance tests for the high-speed networks found in parallel
computers and workstation clusters. coNCePTuaL now passes "make
check" on LLNL's BlueGene/L machine -- the world's fastest
supercomputer at the time of this writing. Other supercomputers on
the top 500 fastest supercomputers list -- http://www.top500.org/ --
on which coNCePTuaL has passed "make check" include NASA's Columbia
(#3), Sandia's Red Storm (#10), LANL's ASCI Q (#12), LANL's Lightning
(#32), ORNL's Cray X1 (#50), and LANL's Flash (#155).... read more

coNCePTuaL is a language-based tool which facilitates the rapid
development of portable+readable+reproducible performance tests for
cluster and parallel-computer networks. coNCePTuaL v0.6.2 introduces
an event-profiling backend, enhances the graphical output of the
program-visualization backend, and improves the semantic-analysis
module's problem-detecting ability. The compiler as a whole is also
~10% faster than before.... read more

coNCePTuaL is a toolset which extends the notion of open source to
tests of network communication performance, especially in the context
of clusters and parallel computers. Log files produced by coNCePTuaL
automatically include not only the measurement data but also the
complete benchmark source code and a detailed description of the
computing environment in which the benchmark was run so anyone can
reproduce your performance test and its results. coNCePTuaL v0.6.1
includes a large set of relatively minor improvements over coNCePTuaL
v0.6. The new "logmerge" (and complementary "logunmerge") utility,
besides making large-cluster runs more convenient, can also identify
differently configured cluster nodes to help track down performance
anomalies. In addition, system interrupts are now tallied in log
files because interrupts can affect measurements.... read more

coNCePTuaL is a toolset which extends the notion of open source to
tests of network communication performance, especially in the context
of clusters and parallel computers. Log files produced by coNCePTuaL
automatically include not only the measurement data but also the
complete benchmark source code and a detailed description of the
computing environment in which the benchmark was run so anyone can
reproduce your performance test and its results. coNCePTuaL v0.6 is a
major new release which introduces an exciting new compiler backend:
latex_vis compiles a coNCePTuaL program into an Encapsulated
PostScript space-time diagram -- a feature not known to exist for any
other programming language. Even if you never actually run a
coNCePTuaL program, you can use the latex_vis backend to illustrate
communication patterns much quicker than with any other drawing tool.... read more

coNCePTuaL is a toolset that extends the notion of open source to
tests of network communication performance, especially in the context
of clusters and parallel computers. Log files produced by coNCePTuaL
automatically include not only the measurement data but also the
complete benchmark source code and a detailed description of the
computing environment in which the benchmark was run so anyone can
reproduce your performance test and its results. Since the previous
release of coNCePTuaL, two minor language features have been added: an
alternative version of the TOUCHES statement that touches message
buffers and an IS NOT IN ternary operator that complements the
existing IS IN operator. There have also been some small improvements
to the build process and various bug fixes.... read more

coNCePTuaL is a toolset that extends the notion of open source to
tests of network communication performance, especially in the context
of clusters and parallel computers. Log files produced by coNCePTuaL
automatically include not only the measurement data but also the
complete benchmark source code and a detailed description of the
computing environment in which the benchmark was run so anyone can
reproduce your performance test and its results. Since the previous
release of coNCePTuaL, there have been some improvements in the
generated code's speed and memory usage, a minor addition to the
language's syntax that enables more English-like punctuation, and the
inclusion of a heavily annotated example program (osu_latency.ncptl)
intended to help new users learn how to rewrite C benchmarks in
coNCePTuaL.... read more