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Category: Collaborative benchmark development

Open source?

We’re proud of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community and its accomplishments over the last five years. We’re also thankful for the contributions the members of the community have made. One of the benefits of membership is access to the source code for all the XPRT performance tools. This has meant that the code is available to anyone willing to take the easy step of joining the community.

Behind our decision to use this model rather than a more traditional, open-source model was the need to control derivative works. The license agreement for the source allows members to modify the source, but not to claim that the results from that derivative code are XPRT results. For example, as a member, you may download the TouchXPRT source and modify the workloads for your specific purposes, but you can’t refer to the results as TouchXPRT results.

After much thought and discussion, we have come to believe that we can protect the benchmarks’ reputation within a traditional, open-source framework. While our original concerns are still valid, we think that the success and stature of the XPRTs is such that we can make it available via open source.

However, before we take this step, we want to hear the thoughts, concerns, and opinions of both our community members and the wider public.

Please note that if we do make the code open source, the other benefits of being a member—access to requests for comment, design documents, and community previews—will not change.

Please let us know that you think. Email us or contact us on Twitter.

Bill

Seeing the future

Back in April we wrote about how Bill’s trip to IDF16 in Shenzhen got us thinking about future benchmarks. Technologies like virtual reality, the Internet of things, and computer vision are going to open up lots of new applications.

Yesterday I saw an amazing article that talked about an automatic computer vision system that is able to detect early-stage esophageal cancer from endoscopy images. These lesions can be difficult for physicians to detect, and the system did very well when compared to four experts who participated in the test. The article contains a link to the original study, for those of you who want more detail.

To me, this is the stuff of science fiction. It’s a very impressive accomplishment. Clearly, new technologies are going to lead to many new and exciting applications.

While this type of application is more specialized than the typical XPRT, things like this get us really excited about the possibilities for the future.  Have you seen an application that impressed you recently? Let us know!

Eric

I couldn’t wait!

We’ve created a series of videos about the XPRT Women Code-a-Thon. We’ll be talking more about the series, and an exciting new channel, “Women Coding for Change,” in next Thursday’s blog post.  However, we posted the first video today, and I wanted to let you know so you can check it out right away!

Eric

Watching students become masters

As you know, last year, PT sponsored a senior project at the Senior Design Center of North Carolina State University (NCSU). The students created Nebula Wolf, a mini game that might evolve into a future benchmark test. It was a valuable collaboration for us and a very educational experience for the students involved.

I’ve talked before about the emerging technologies we’re considering for new benchmarks. Today, I met with the folks at the NCSU Senior Design Center to discuss a possible future project. We’re hoping to harness the immense energy of these students by having them explore one of these new technologies, and then build on what they discover. Nothing is set yet, but we will, as always, keep you informed as things develop.

We’ll be sharing some exciting news about the XPRT Women Code-a-Thon tomorrow. Check back to find out more!  Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy as much as we did the University of Washington Tacoma article on student Viveret, the first place winner of the XPRT Women Code-a-Thon.

Eric

Getting it right

Back in April Bill announced that we are working on a cross-platform benchmark. We asked for your thoughts and comments, and you’ve been great! We really appreciate all the great ideas.

We’ve been using code from MobileXPRT and TouchXPRT as the basis for some experiments. In his post, Bill talked about the difficulty of porting applications. However, even though we have expertise in porting applications, it’s proving more difficult than we originally thought. Benchmarks are held to a higher standard than most applications. It’s not enough for the code to run reliably and efficiently, it must compare the different platforms fairly.

One thing we know for sure: getting it right is going to take a while. However, we owe it to you to make sure that the benchmark is reliable and fair on all platforms it supports. We will, of course, keep you informed as things progress.

In the meantime, keep sending your ideas!
Eric

Windows 10 upgrade?

We’ve gotten reports that HDXPRT 2014 no longer works on newer versions of Windows 10. We ran tests in our labs and found that to be true.

At least one user has reported that the problem may be the version of CPU-Z the benchmark uses.

We’re working to track down the problem and hope to provide a workaround in the near future and a more definitive fix (if necessary) later.

Please let us know if you’ve encountered this issue and if you’ve found any ways to work around it.

Eric

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