Resuming SPEC performance tracking at RedHat

[Vladimir N. Makarov]

  People from gcc community found that GCC performance tracking at
RedHat stopped after Diego left RedHat.  As I understand this was
helpful for some of them.  Therefore we decided to resume GCC
Performance Tracking on GCC.  This work is based on Diego Novillo's
scripts (Diego, thanks for the good scripts) with the following
changes:

  o Only Intel Core2 machine is used now for this.  I don't plan to do
    performance tracking for other machines (like PPC, AMD, and Itanium)
    because they are already tested by SUSE and I don't want a
    duplication and to use rare not mainstream machines which could be
    used for development purposes in RedHat.

  o SPEC2000 will be tested for 64-bit and 32-bit mode (-m32).

  o I am not going to use SPEC95 for performance tracking.  It is too
    small benchmarks which does not reflect modern size programs.

  o I've added SPEC2006 performance tracking.  It will be done once a
    week because SPEC2006 takes > 10 times more
    time for execution.  The SPEC2006 will be run only for -O2
    -mtune=generic and only for 64-bit mode .

  o Now SPEC2000 and SPEC2006 will run 3 times (as it is used for
    reportable results).  It permits to generate graphs with the error
    marks (minimal and maximum values will be presented on the graph. For
    geom. mean scores, the geom. mean of minimal scores and maximum scores
    will be present).  I think it will be useful even if it may look
    ugly.

  o Sometimes people saw unexpected drop or increase in scores.
    Usually it was result of one or more SPEC program failure.  Now
    scores with failed programs will be marked on the graphs.

  o I removed elapsed compilation times which was measured with one
    second accuracy.  I found them not useful
    especially for individual programs (e.g. compilation time of gzip
    was 1, 2 or 3 seconds depended from how lucky we were).

  o I've added CPU (user time) compilation time for all SPEC only.  In
    general case it has no sense to measure them for individual
    benchmarks because of runspec start time (measuring them without
    runspec start time would require SPEC testsuite modification).

    The compiler is built with release checking to see the final
    result to see how the release would look like.

  o I am going to do release performance tracking too.  Now there is
    comparison of 3.2 to 4.2 releases.

The result for SPEC2000 will be ready at 6am ET for 64-bit mode at
12pm for 32-bit mode from Monday to Saturday.  The result for SPEC2006
will be ready at 2pm on Sunday.

There is a possibility that the results will be not posted on next week
because I'll be on vacation and because the used site is in beta state
but they will be posted later and not lost.  I hope Intel server
survive such rigorous testing too.

The performance tracking results is on

https://vmakarov.108.redhat.com/nonav/spec/index.html

Vlad