How to "Automatically" test my Entity without .vwf/.bdf files - automated-tests

I am writing in VHDL (at Quartus II Web Edition [Software v9.1 Service Pack 2]) for a project of mine and I encountered a problem.
I have created a large decoder which I would like to test but not via creating a .bdf file and then adding a vector waveform file on it.
For the needs of this testing I have made a Python script to create .txt files with the proper 32bit vectors on it and then I am inserting them (c/p) to the .vwf file. Finally I do a timing simulation and then observe the outputs if they are the correct ones or not...but this is really time consuming and I think there is probably a better way to do it.
Or should I add the pain of converting by hand the 32bit values to integers to see that they are the ones expected after testing.
So, is there a faster/easier way to do it?
Thanks in advance!

Related

Is there any profiler able to identify the name of variables being copied in and out GPU with openacc program

I'm trying to accelerate a legacy MPI Fortran program with GPU and OpenACC. And after I compile and profile the program with Nsight system, I found some unexpected data copy from HtoD and DtoH. I want to mitigate those data transfers by copy them in advance, but I could not find out what exactly was copied in and out. The program is quite large with many many source files, is there any ways to quickly identify the variable name corresponding to memcpy HtoD and DtoH shown on the profiler.
I also tried with PGI_ACC_DEBUG mode, but the information is overwhelming and I could not identify which is actually the data transfer I'm looking for. Is there some good practices to do that?
Unfortunately, I don't know a way to get this association from Nsight-systems. You might try using the environment variable "PGI_ACC_NOTIFY=2". This displays a more concise debug output, showing the file line, variable name, and size in bytes. Note that PGI_ACC_NOTIFY uses a bit mask to control what's being displayed with "1" being the kernel launches, "2" being the data transfers, and "3" being both.

R unable to process heavy tasks for many hours

I have a list [~90 files] of zipped files . I have written a loop to unzip them (become 1Gb approx. per file), do some computations, save the output for each of the files and delete the unzipped file. One iteration of this process takes like 30-60min per file [not all files are the same size exactly].
I am not too worried about the time as I can leave it working over the weekend. However, R doesn’t manage to get all the way through. I left it on Friday night and it was only running 12 hours so it only processed 30 of the 90 files.
I don’t deal with this type of heavy processes often but the same has happened in the past with analogous processes. Is there any command I need to insert in my loops to avoid the computer from freezing with this intensive processes? I tried gc() at the end of the loop to no avail.
Is there a list of “good practice” recommendations for this type of procedures?
If your session is freezing you are likely running into a problem you need to isolate as it may be a single file, or maybe you are becoming restricted by memory or extensively using swap.
Regardless, here are some tips or ideas you could implement:
Writing your code to process a file as a singular case, e.g. a function like
process_gz_folder(). Then loop over the file paths and invoke the function you created each time, this keeps the global environment clean.
As you already tried, sometimes gc() can help, but it depends on the situation and if memory is being cleared (after running rm() for example). Could be used after invoking function in first point.
Are you keeping the results of each folder in memory? Does this set of results get larger with each iteration? If so this may be taking up required memory - storing the results to disk as a suitable format will let you accumulate the results after each has been processed.
To add to the prior point, if files produce outputs making sure their names are appropriate and even adding a timestamp (e.g. inputfile_results_YYYYMMDD).
Code could check if file is already processed and skip to next, this can help restarting from scratch, especially if your method for checking if a file is processed is using the existence of an output (with timestamp!).
Using try() to make sure failures do not stop future iterations - however this should produce warnings/output to notify of a failure so that you can come back at a later point.
An abstract approach could be to create a single script that processes a single file, it could just include the function from the first point, proceeded with setTimeLimit() and provide a time for which if the file is not processed the code will stop running. Iterate over this script with a bash script invoking said R script with Rscript which can be passed arguments (filepaths for example). This approach may help avoid freezes but is dependent on you knowing and setting an acceptable time.
Determine if the files are too large for memory when processing the code may need be adjusted to be more memory efficient or change code to process the data incrementally as to not run out of memory.
Reduce other tasks on the computer that can take resources that may cause a freeze.
These are just some ideas that spring to mind that could be things to consider in your example (given the info provided). It would help to see some code and understand what kind of processing you are doing on each file.
Given as little information as you have provided, it is hard to tell what the problem really is.
If possible, I would first unzip and concatenate the files. Then preprocess the data and strip off all fields that are not required for analysis. The resulting file would then be used as input for R.
Also be aware that parsing the input strings as e.g. timestamps may be quite time consuming.

R JIT compiler - is there a way to automatically pre-compile all functions in a script? (for use with shiny)

Is there a way to get R to precompile all functions in a script?
The reason it matters is because the script is code for rshiny. I'd like to push forward the byte compiling to occur when the server starts up rather when the user is requesting a page.
I know cmpfun() could be used to compile one function at a time and modify function calls accordingly, but I'd like to do this without maintaining the extra boilerplate code if it's possible.
You should be able to use the JIT from compiler with:
library(compiler)
enableJIT(3)
or set the environment variable R_ENABLE_JIT to non-negative (3 is the highest amount of compilation). I did a quick experiment with my Shiny app and this seemed to produce no benefit at all, so maybe something is not working correctly. This page provides a few more details on R compilation options.

project organization with R [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Workflow for statistical analysis and report writing
I have been programming with R for not too long but am running into a project organization question that I was hoping somebody could give me some tips on. I am finding that a lot of the analysis I do is ad hoc: that is, I run something, think about the results, tweek it and run some more. This is conceptually different than in a language like C++ where you think about the entire thing you want to run before coding. It is a huge benefit of interpreted languages. However, the issue that comes up is I end up having a lot of .RData files that I save so I don't have to source my script every time. Does anyone have any good ideas about how to organize my project so I can return to it a month later and have a good idea of what each file is associated with?
This is sort of a documentation question I guess. Should I document my entire project at each leg and be vigorous about cleaning up files that will no longer be necessary but were a byproduct of the research? This is my current system but it is a bit cumbersome. Does anyone else have any other suggestions?
Per the comment below: One of the key things that I am trying to avoid is the proliferation of .R analysis files and .RData sets that go along with them.
Some thoughts on research project organisation here:
http://software-carpentry.org/4_0/data/mgmt/
the take-home message being:
Use Version Control for your programs
Use sensible directory names
Use Version Control for your metadata
Really, Version Control is a good thing.
My analysis is a knitr document, with some external .R files which are called from it.
All data is in a database, but during my analysis the processed data are saved as .RData files. Only when I delete the RData, they are recreated from the database when I run the analysis again. Kinda like a cache, saves database access and data processing time when I rerun (parts of) my analysis.
Using a knitr (Sweave, etc) document for the analysis enables you to easily write a documented workflow with the results included. And knitr caches the results of the analysis, so small changes do usually not result in a full rerun of all R code, but only of a small section. Saves quite some running time for a bigger analysis.
(Ah, and as said before: use version control. Another tip: working with knitr and version control is very easy with RStudio.)

I'm working with Drupal and I want to diff between two databases, to see which tables have been updated in a given session. how do I do this?

I'm working with Drupal on a project, trying to find a way to speed up tests (we're using Cucumber and Selenium), and I'm trying to see which tables have been changed in a given series of steps, so I can just revert dump and out reset those tables between each test case.
Right now, Simpletest, the Drupal testing framework works by installing and setting up the tables for every module needed for a test, which makes for slow tests, and I'm emulating a similar approach by loading a db dump for each test.
Given that a site, if you're doing integration testing has a 'known good' state to be starting from, I think it would be faster to be able to just revert back to that point each time, instead of waiting twenty seconds or so to drop the database then pipe the dumpfile back in between each test runs.
However, when I try diffing between two dumpfiles (ie before.I.create.a.node.sql, and after.I.create.a.node.sql) the output is an unreadable load of serialised php, that I can't make sense of.
Ae there any tools I can use to help work out which tables I need to drop and rebuild between test cases, so I don't incur the 20 second hit on each test, short of reading the schema and code of every module I'm working with?
I'm following the ideas outlined here with getting cucumber to work with PHP, and yes, I have seen [this question here on a similar subject
Thanks!
Drupal does store a lot of serialized PHP in the database. But the main part of it is kept in the cache tables; like cache, cache_field, cache_menu, etc and you can safely truncate these before dumping the database.
If you have any simpletest tables you could drop those. They are all temporary and is used only for running your Simpletest test suite.
That should reduce the dump size a lot. If it's not enough I can recommend reading up on the tables in the book Pro Drupal Development, or you could skim through the .install files to read the module's schema definitions. Though most will probably be real data you'd want to revert between tests.
Because of the relational nature of the database, be sure to either know exactly what you're doing or dump/revert all the remaining tables together.

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