BenchExec 3.25

Description:

BenchExec 3.25

BenchExec
A Framework for Reliable Benchmarking and Resource Measurement




News and Updates:

Successful Google Summer of Code project by
Haoran Yang
brings integration of fuse-overlayfs into BenchExec 3.25!
This makes BenchExec's default directory configuration for the container mode work out-of-the-box again
without having to pass parameters such as --read-only-dir /.
BenchExec 3.18 brings support for systems with cgroups v2!
We now provide an Ubuntu PPA that makes installing and upgrading BenchExec easier (docs).
An extended version of our paper on BenchExec and its background was published as open access in the journal STTT,
you can read Reliable Benchmarking: Requirements and Solutions online.
We also provide a set of overview slides.


To help new or inexperienced users get started with reliable benchmarking
right away, we offer a quickstart guide that contains
a brief explanation of the issues of common setups as well as the (few)
steps necessary to setup and use BenchExec instead.

BenchExec is a framework for reliable benchmarking and resource measurement
and provides a standalone solution for benchmarking
that takes care of important low-level details for accurate, precise, and reproducible measurements
as well as result handling and analysis for large sets of benchmark runs.
However, even users of other benchmarking frameworks or scripts
can benefit from BenchExec
by letting it perform the resource measurements and limits
instead of less reliable tools and techniques like time or ulimit,
and results produced by BenchExec can easily be exported for use with other tools.
In particular, BenchExec provides three major features:

execution of arbitrary commands with precise and reliable measurement
and limitation of resource usage (e.g., CPU time and memory),
and isolation against other running processes
(provided by runexec,
a replacement for time and similar tools)
an easy way to define benchmarks with specific tool configurations
and resource limits,
and automatically executing them on large sets of input files
(provided by benchexec
on top of runexec)
generation of interactive tables and plots for the results
(provided by table-generator
for results produced with benchexec)

Unlike other benchmarking frameworks,
BenchExec is able to reliably measure and limit resource usage
of the benchmarked tool even if the latter spawns subprocesses.
In order to achieve this,
it uses the cgroups feature
of the Linux kernel to correctly handle groups of processes.
For proper isolation of the benchmarks, it uses (if available)
Linux user namespaces
and an overlay filesystem
(either kernel-based
or fuse-overlayfs)
to create a container
that restricts interference of the executed tool with the benchmarking host.
More information on why this is necessary and the problems with other tools
can be found in our paper
Reliable Benchmarking: Requirements and Solutions (open access)
and our slides
(starting with slide "Checklist").
BenchExec is intended for benchmarking non-interactive tools on Linux systems.
It measures CPU time, wall time, and memory usage of a tool,
and allows to specify limits for these resources.
It also allows to limit the CPU cores and (on NUMA systems) memory regions,
and the container mode allows to restrict filesystem and network access.
In addition to measuring resource usage,
BenchExec can optionally verify that the result of the tool was as expected
and extract further statistical data from the output.
Results from multiple runs can be combined into CSV and interactive HTML tables,
of which the latter provide scatter and quantile plots
(have a look at our demo table).
BenchExec works only on Linux and needs a one-time setup of cgroups by the machine's administrator.
The actual benchmarking can be done by any user and does not need root access.
BenchExec was originally developed for use with the software verification framework
CPAchecker
and is now developed as an independent project
at the Software Systems Lab
of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich).
Links

Documentation
Demo of a result table
Downloads
Changelog
BenchExec GitHub Repository,
use this for reporting issues and asking questions
BenchExec at PyPI
BenchExec at Zenodo: Each release gets a DOI such that you can reference it from your publications and artifacts.

Literature

Reliable Benchmarking: Requirements and Solutions, by D. Beyer, S. Löwe, and P. Wendler. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), 21(1):1-29, 2019. doi:10.1007/s10009-017-0469-y. Journal paper about BenchExec (open access, also with a supplementary webpage and overview slides)
CPU Energy Meter: A Tool for Energy-Aware Algorithms Engineering, by D. Beyer and P. Wendler. In Proc. TACAS 2020, part 2, LNCS 12079, pages 126-133, 2020. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45237-7_8
Benchmarking and Resource Measurement, by D. Beyer, S. Löwe, and P. Wendler. In Proc. SPIN 2015, LNCS 9232, pages 160-178, 2015. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-23404-5_12

License and Copyright
BenchExec is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License,
copyright Dirk Beyer.
Exceptions are some tool-info modules
and third-party code that is bundled in the HTML tables,
which are available under several other free licenses
(cf. folder LICENSES).
Authors
Maintainer: Philipp Wendler
Contributors:

Eshaan Aggarwal
Aditya Arora
Levente Bajczi
Dirk Beyer
Laura Bschor
Thomas Bunk
Montgomery Carter
Po-Chun Chien
Andreas Donig
Florian Eder
Karlheinz Friedberger
Robin Gloster
Sam Grayson
Peter Häring
Florian Heck
Chinmay Joshi
George Karpenkov
Mike Kazantsev
Hugo van Kemenade
Tobias Kleinert
Michael Lachner
Thomas Lemberger
Lorenz Leutgeb
Sebastian Ott
Stefan Löwe
Stephan Lukasczyk
Tobias Meggendorfer
Alexander von Rhein
Alexander Schremmer
Dennis Simon
Andreas Stahlbauer
Thomas Stieglmaier
Martin Yankov
Hojan Young
Ilja Zakharov
and lots of more people who integrated tools into BenchExec

Users of BenchExec
Several well-known international competitions use BenchExec,
such as SMT-COMP,
SV-COMP (software verification),
the Termination Competition,
and
Test-Comp.
In particular in SV-COMP
BenchExec was used successfully for benchmarking in all instances of the competition
and with a wide variety of benchmarked tools and millions of benchmark runs per year.
BenchExec is also integrated into the cluster-based logic-solving service
StarExec (GitHub).
The developers of the following tools use BenchExec:

CPAchecker, also for regression testing
Dartagnan
ESBMC, also for regression testing and even with a GitHub action for BenchExec
SMACK
SMTInterpol
TriCera
Ultimate

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