Benchmarks

[christiangnrd]

Thanks for adding these @anicusan!

I'm thinking of using these as a starting point for the GPUArrays benchmark suite (if that's okay with you obviously). Should I bother with submitting PRs to this codebase with any more complex fixes/changes? I'll definitely open PRs for things like #42, but would you like me to upstream more elaborate changes? For example, I'm thinking of reformatting to make it easier to pull out the benchmarking data and graph and things like that.

Also, these currently only measure kernel launch time for GPU backends since the kernels are not synchronized. I'm not sure what the current best way to add this while making it easy to change backend. Maybe a helper function that adds a synchronization call after running the passed-in function?

[anicusan]

Absolutely, it would be extremely useful to have an up-to-date benchmarks suite and a benchmarks runner for commits

[christiangnrd]

No runner but #58 refactors the benchmarks.