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Brian 2 benchmarks

This repository hosts runtime and memory benchmarks for the Brian 2 simulator. The results are available here: https://brian-team.github.io/brian2_benchmarks/

Benchmarking is done with the tool airspeed velocity (asv).

Writing benchmarks

Refer to the airspeed velocity documentation for general explanations about writing benchmarks. A few comments specific to the Brian 2 simulator:

  • Brian has a system that caches intermediate results for code generation. The clear_cache function in benchmarks/benchmarks.py will clear this cache to avoid that it interferes with the measurements. However, the setup function responsible for doing this kind of preparation work is only called for each "repeat", not for the "number" of runs (see Python's timeit documentation for details). We therefore explicitly set number to 1.
  • Similarly, we delete the on-disk caches for runtime targets, and generate standalone code in fresh temporary directories each time.
  • For tests run with the standalone target, we have to set the timer explicitly (e.g. to timeit.default_timer), because the default timer used by asv only measures the time in the main process. Since the actual standalone simulation is run in a subprocess, the time spent during the actual simulation would not be counted!

Running benchmarks

Again, the airspeed velocity documentation has most of the necessary information. A useful command during development of new benchmarks is to run benchmarks only for the latest revision, the current Python version and with a single repetition:

$ asv dev

Note that asv run takes arguments in the same way as git log, i.e. it will by default run benchmarks for a range of revisions. To run benchmarks for a single revision, you can use the ^! shorthand, e.g. to run benchmarks only for the 2.1.2 release:

$ asv run 2.1.2^!

Updating benchmarks on github page

Run the asv command to push to the gh-pages branch:

$ asv gh-pages

This will currently not work directly because it tries to overwrite the gh-pages branch with the new results. You'll therefore additionally have to force-push:

$ git push --force origin gh-pages