Introducing the MachineState reproducibility tool
MachineState is a python3 module and CLI application for documenting and comparing settings known to affect application performance: e.g., CPU/Uncore frequencies, hardware prefetchers, memory capacity, but also OS and software settings like NUMA balancing, writeback workqueues, scheduling, or the versions of common tools and libraries (e.g., compilers and MPI). All this information can be essential for reproduction of benchmark results. The MachineState tool gathers all (known) settings and presents them as a JSON document. A state file written earlier can be compared to the current machine state to uncover deviations from the original test system.
Check out the MachineState github project, maintained by Thomas “TomTheBear” Gruber!