compute: add multiple CPU stressing abilities

[tomcucinotta]

Currently, the COMPUTE() loop is a pure time-wasting loop, designed to be insensitive to the DVFS/frequency settings of the underlying CPU, as well as to the underlying CPU architecture/type. This avoids us the need to lock the CPU frequency for each and every test, but it is far from representative of how real workloads behave. Furthermore, this makes it impossible to investigate on smart DVFS/performance trade-off management policies, esp. on heterogeneous distributed environments (including GPU/CUDA, cloud/edge, ...).

We'd need to have more involved stressing loops, that can be realized as:

• simple loops that perform a pre-fixed amount of work (i.e., -C 10000 would mean 10ms at max frequency, but it will take longer for lower frequencies)
• loops with more involved data processing, to exercise more elements of the CPU (adders, multipliers, floating point unit(s), ...
• loops swiping a predefined amount of data, to emulate workloads with varying working-set sizes, e.g., data compression/decompression or encryption/decryption, A/V media encoding/decoding, algebraic computations (vectors, matrices and the likes), big-data workloads (very big vectors and matrices), ML/AI workloads (DNNs);

For example, we might be willing to specify, e.g., the number of times we gzip/encrypt/etc. with what operation parameters a data chunk of a given size; or, how many blocks 16x16 (or with different sizes if supported) of an image we process with a mpeg or different encoder/decoder, or what image of what size/resolution/depth we process with what image filter (e.g., using the ImageMagick library...).

Stressing different features of the CPU, its L1/L2/LLC cache, the memory datapath and memory controller(s), is useful to emulate phenomena of noisy neighbor due to cache-level interference or memory-access interference/saturation, as typically happens with cloud workloads, esp. in presence of big-data processing pipelines.

Perhaps some of the above might be realized by spawning stress-ng, or any command-line utility the client decides (ok, security concerns...), albeit that would imply forking and waiting for a process to complete per request. Web servers might still do that through CGI-BIN.

Probably adding CUDA/GPU workloads is also a must...

[deRemo]

Stress-ng allows for user-defined stressors written in C. It may be worthwhile checking in the source code how it handles security concerns (if any)

[tomcucinotta]

distwalk is a server that, so far, just lets you launch some stress workload on a node, collecting latencies, but security concerns will arise if/when it will allow launching arbitrary commands on the server, even if merely under an unprivileged user account -- however, launching a stress-ng command with a checked/restricted syntax should be safe; (adding authentication and/or SSL among dw_* nodes is something desirable to have though, sooner or later...)