Brightway benchmarks

How long Brightway's calculations take in each released version, and whether they still give the right score. Every case runs on a synthetic database with the structure of ecoinvent, so no licensed data is involved.

Start with bw2calc's time for one score on the ecoinvent-sized database, per solver, across every release since 2.0. What the histories show so far is in the README.

Histories

• bw2calc

  One score, a second functional unit, many functional units at once, and Monte Carlo draws, with each direct solver (SuperLU, PyPardiso, UMFPACK) and the iterative ones.

• bw2data

  Writing a database, up to the size of ecoinvent.

• bw_graph_tools

  Supply-chain graph traversal, small and large.

• bw_processing

  Building datapackages from many resource groups.

• bw_timex

  The time-explicit LCI as the timeline grows.

• matrix_utils

  Building matrices from many resource groups.

Reading the graphs

• Each point is one release. Lower is faster.
• Each line is one environment. For bw2calc the environment name says the solver: pypardiso, scikit-umfpack, or neither for SciPy's SuperLU.
• Only the package changes along a line. Its dependencies stay fixed, so a step is the package's own change.
• Every timing ran one thread, pinned to one set of CPU cores. Compare points within a line, not times between machines.