More detailed platform data

[dingens]

Currently, the platform field in benchmark is just a string field. Data would be more useful if we made this more machine readable. For example, we could automatically determine which measurements (of different schemes) are comparable, and we could automatically convert cycle counts to seconds.

[dingens]

My proposal would be that we add a new data type platform or machine or so (stored globally, meaning on the highest level), identified by a name. The name would for example be frodo-skylake (e.g. when we copy data from the frodo devs' measurements on a skylake processor) or supercop-whatever (when importing data from supercop on the processor named whatever there). In the latter case, this entry would be referenced by many benchmarks, so we would immediately see that they are all comparable.

Possible data fields (probably not all are relevant. This list includes all data that is currently stored in platform fields.)

• architecture (aka instruction set)
• processor name
• processor "group" (skylake, arm5, haswell)
• speed
• ram
• ram speed
• word size (64/32)
• kernel (+version)
• operating system (+version)
• compiler
• compiler version
• compiler flags

[dingens]

And rename platform to machine to avoid ambiguity with the platform field in implementation (where it means one of c, fpga and such)