[Bioclusters] release announcement: informatics benchmarking toolkit (IBT)

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi folks,

IBT has been available for a few weeks now but I did not want to publish 
the news here until I knew we had some mirror sites and some external 
users reporting success.

Anyway- Bill Van Etten wrote a toolkit for AMD as part of an opteron 
benchmarking project late last year and AMD was nice enough to release 
what we did as open source.

The BioITWorld column describing IBT is online here:
http://www.bio-itworld.com/archive/011204/box.html

The whole point is that IBT was designed to help an informatics 
researcher answer the following question:

  *** How fast does _this_ machine execute _my_ data analysis
  algorithms the way _I_ use them? ***

The neat thing about the framework is that results are first saved in 
Lincoln Stein's BoulderIO format. Each boulder file can be turned into a 
browsable SVG graphical image, multiple reports can be concatenated into 
a single SVG document containing many different test results.

Reports can be optionally published to our site and we have a simple php 
script online that allows people to browse and check out the results 
that people submit.

Personally I feel that IBT is going to be of most use to people who are 
making hardware purchase decisions and want to run some locally 
meaningful tests before deciding on a vendor. Adding the report archive 
and browser to our site was an afterthought that will probably be more 
interesting than informative. The goal with IBT was to create something 
that is usable/useful in a local testing context.

If this interests you check out the info page at http://bioteam.net/ibt/

Comments/feedback welcome!

Regards,
Chris



-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
PGP KeyID: 83D4310E Yahoo IM: craffi Web: http://bioteam.net