Testing a System for Huygens

Huygens uses some resource intensive algorithms to perform the image processing. The best way to test whether your system is capable of running such intensive tasks is obviously to run the actual software on your system. However, some systems do not have the resources available that Huygens needs to function properly. Especially virtual machines are known causes for vague and hard to diagnose problems. The best way to test if there is a problem with Huygens or the system is to run additional external benchmarks. Care must be taken to test the processor and memory, since Huygens uses them both very heavily. We recommend to run the test application that is distributed with the fftw library (link). Notes on running (and downloading) this benchmark can be found below.

Running the FFTW benchmark on linux

Obtaining the benchmark

There are two options to obtain the bench application that can be used to stress the system.

• Download, configure and make fftw from the sources (link). Take care to enable threading and/or openmp in the configure script. The bench application can be found in the tests directory after complication.
• Download bench from the following link: bench. You may have to install the openmp library on your system.

Running the benchmark

To test a system use the following command:

./bench --verbose=2 -onthreads=16 -s 2048x2048x128

This command uses 16GB of RAM and multiple (16) cpus to stress the system. It may take a while to complete and will stress your system. Use the top command or system monitor to monitor the system during the benchmark to see if it really consumes a large amount of memory and uses the multiple processors properly.