Phoronix Media unveils Trondheim

GRAND RAPIDS, USA: Phoronix Media has released version 1.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite (codenamed "Trondheim"), an extensible open-source platform for conducting Linux-based benchmarking and performance profiling targeted at IHVs, ISVs, and technology hobbyists.

The Phoronix Test Suite combines years of Linux testing by Phoronix Media with input from leading technology companies to offer the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for the Linux Operating System. The Phoronix Test Suite also offers unprecedented capabilities for collaboration via the suite's online component.

"Over the past several years the Linux ecosystem has changed. For a large part it's now rare to find Linux incompatible hardware, but it's becoming a matter of having vendors optimize their drivers and ensuring a quality experience across a wide array of software. The Phoronix Test Suite looks to address this issue in part by providing a platform for conducting tests in an autonomous, reproducible, and standardized environment," said Michael Larabel, the founder of Phoronix Media and lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite.

He added, "The impact of the Phoronix Test Suite isn't limited to those interested in better optimizing their software or quality assurance teams ensuring device compatibility, but a by-product of this is greater vitality within the Linux ecosystem by fostering the growth of a standardized test specification."

This software is provided under the GNU GPLv3 license to allow independent developers and companies to use this framework with the included tests, write test profiles for their own applications, or utilize third-party sources. A basic test profile can be written in a matter of minutes using the documented, standardized XML-based specification with support for installing the software, carrying out the programmed tests, and reporting the results. Through the turnkey deployment capabilities of the Phoronix Test Suite each test is run in a standardized, easy to use, and repeatable fashion on any Linux distribution and any system configuration.

"The overall flexibility and usability of the Phoronix Test Suite makes it easy to create complex testing configurations and still have the results presented in a readable and understandable fashion," said Andrew Schofield, a computational biologist and one of the contributing developers to the Phoronix Test Suite.

"Many of the software tools used in computational biology involve running tasks or analyses for extended periods of time due to the amount of computation required. Even a relatively simple molecular dynamics simulation can take a whole day of CPU time to only produce a couple nanoseconds of the simulation. The Phoronix Test Suite should be able to offer insight into what machine configurations perform the best at different tasks."

The Phoronix Test Suite can be downloaded from the company website.