[petsc-dev] comments on make streams

[Jed Brown]

Handy visualization, though I think the red text is excessive [1] and as
something unrelated from correctness of the installation, I'm not sure
it should be displayed as part of "make all", especially when it doesn't
run on batch systems.

I see a lot of variability between runs (e.g., erratic performance on
es.mcs.anl.gov attached), so perhaps we should be making box-and-whisker
plots.  This is a balancing act because we don't want the test to take a
long time to run.

While the "ideal speedup" line is visceral, it makes it hard to see
what's actually happening.  I would either remove that line or add a
second y axis that is unscaled (second attachment).  Either way, we
should find a way to report numbers rather than unscaled speedup.

It's crazy that a plot of intra-node scalability of STREAMS is not
posted prominently in computing facility documentation.


[1] I still disagree with using colored text unconditionally.  I don't
want control characters in log files and emails.  We could test whether
output is going to a TTY so long as a separate stream is being sent to
the screen than the log files.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: scaling-es.png
Type: image/png
Size: 31546 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20140323/b5a8a422/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: scaling.png
Type: image/png
Size: 41350 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20140323/b5a8a422/attachment-0001.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20140323/b5a8a422/attachment.sig>