From Autotools to CMake

Since my paper on GPU benchmarking was published, every once in a while, I got emails asking me why Altis doesn’t build on their platforms. It almost always has something to do a small script which is responsible for finding CUDA dependencies. This script is invoked every single time make is executed. For some reason, the regular expression in the script sometimes breaks randomly, depending on the Linux distro, the kernel version, the host architecture, or even the CUDA version. After enough requests piled up in my inbox, I decided enough is enough and it’s time to ditch the autotools shenanigans for CMake.

When I started this project, it already had a skeleton build system based on autotools. The old build system generates automake and autoconf files. It worked fine for me on the server I used so I never bothered to make big adjustments. However, the problem soon arises when I upgrade some packages or switched to another server in our lab.

Because our servers are constantly being used for GPU research, the execution environment is constantly changing. Sometimes the benchmark suite would build in the morning and stop working in the afternoon because of a CUDA downgrade. My...