[PATCH 0 of 7] Automated benchmarks for VIFF.

[Thomas Pelle Jakobsen]

Here's my initial attempt at automating benchmarks and graph
generation in VIFF. Some parts of it is borrowed from the benchmark.py
script that's alread in the repository.

The main goal is to make it easy to write, run, and generate graphs
for distributed VIFF benchmarks while at the same time not limiting
the kind of benchmarks that could be made. Another design goal is that
the code should scale as the number of benchmarks increase. An approah
is chosen where benchmark data is collected in a central database
rather than as a bunch of text files. My feeling is that this eases
data maintainability and production of more complex statistics.

The code is by no means finished. Lots of TODO's are still there,
documentation can be improved, and I haven't done much to remove
trailing whitespaces, etc. However, I've reached a state where I'm
actually able to use it to run benchmarks on the DAIMI hosts while
data is reported to a MySQL database at my computer at home.

I post the patch now hoping that an early review will result in time
saved, so please feel free to comment on the code. I'd be happy to
hear about bugs and ideas for improving it. I'm quite a newbie in
Python, so if I've done something very non-pythonic, please let me
know, too :-)

A good place to start is example.py and the benchmark examples in
examples/. The list of featurs and issues in the top of suite.py is
also a good starting point.