[gentoo-soc] Benchmarking suite - Report 8

[Andrea Arteaga <andyspiros@gmail.com>]

A very short log of what has been done during the last days. I am
working on the PBLAS and ScaLAPACK benchmarks, which is a very
challenging topic, because it is very difficult to debug such
applications.

* I changed some parts of the BTL framework, adapting it to the
distributed memory benchmarks. This has required writing two new
perfanalyzers -- one for the root process, one for the other (node)
processes. The nodes do not perform any measurement, while the root
process broadcasts the needed informations, measures the time and
manages the output (both std{out,err} and resulting file).

* I added a BLACS library that provides an useful interface which
scatters and gathers matrices and vectors. I also added a PBLAS
library that inherits the BLACS one and will support the most common
operations (at the moment just the parallel matrix-vector
multiplication).

* I added an action for the parallel matrix-vector multiplication
which makes use of the two described interfaces.

The matrix-vector multiplication is a case study for now. If
everything goes fine (and it seems so, now), then more actions will be
provided, for both PBLAS and ScaLAPACL, which share the same concepts.
I plan to have tomorrow a working (but incomplete) Python module for
PBLAS, too.

Milestones for the next week:
* Having working PBLAS and ScaLAPACK modules
* Do some benchmarks using these modules and publish the results
* Start the implementation of the advanced FFTW benchmarks, as
previously described

Best regards
Andrea Arteaga