+------------------------------+
| coNCePTuaL |
| ---------- |
| A network correctness and |
| performance testing language |
| |
| By Scott Pakin, |
| pakin@lanl.gov |
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Description
coNCePTuaL is a domain-specific programming language for rapidly generating programs that measure the performance and/or test the correctness of networks and network protocol layers. A few lines of coNCePTuaL code can produce programs that would take significantly more effort to write in a conventional programming language.
Installation
The basic installation procedure is as follows:
./configure <== Creates a Makefile
make <== Uses the Makefile to build coNCePTuaL
make check <== Verifies that coNCePTuaL built properly [optional]
make install <== Installs coNCePTuaL
In practice, however, it is common to pass arguments to configure to customize coNCePTuaL's configuration. Running "./configure --help" provides information about the various options and the coNCePTuaL user's guide (doc/conceptual.pdf) expounds upon these in greater detail. A non-root user installing coNCePTuaL for his own use (as opposed to the root user installing coNCePTuaL cluster-wide) will typically issue a command like the following:
./configure --prefix=/home/pakin/conceptual
The preceding --prefix option tells "make install" to install into /home/pakin/conceptual/bin, /home/pakin/conceptual/lib, /home/pakin/conceptual/man, etc. instead of the default /usr/local/{bin,lib,man}. (Of course, "/home/pakin" should be replaced with the directory you intend to use as the root of the coNCePTuaL installation tree.)
To reconfigure coNCePTuaL after running "./configure" and "make", run "make distclean" to restore coNCePTuaL to its pre-"./configure" state.
Usage
The coNCePTuaL distribution comes with a large set of sample programs. Here's how one might compile and run a latency test using the c_udgram backend (which runs locally on a workstation):
# Replace [...] with the appropriate directory for your installation # (e.g., /usr/local/share/conceptual). ncptl --backend=c_udgram --output=latency [...]/examples/latency.ncptl
# The following should take a bit of time to run. If the dynamic # linker can't find the ncptl library then you should append the # full path of the coNCePTuaL [...]/lib/ directory to your # LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. ./latency --tasks=2
# Let's look at the results.
cat latency-0.log
See the coNCePTuaL user's guide (doc/conceptual.pdf) for a thorough description of coNCePTuaL usage.