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Jashwanth Thatipamula
Jashwanth Thatipamula

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Why I Built a Dedicated Benchmarking System

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on large-scale benchmarks for SmartKNN.

What I didn’t expect was how frustrating benchmarking itself would become.

  • Not the models.
  • Not the algorithms.
  • But the process.

Every benchmark script turned into a mess:

  • Slightly different preprocessing
  • Hidden data leakage
  • Inconsistent splits
  • Models “available” but failing at runtime
  • DL models requiring totally different environments
  • No clear visibility into what actually runs on my machine

At some point, Benchmarking stopped being about models and started being about debugging pipelines.

So I paused.

And instead of writing another benchmark script, I built a Benchmarking system.


SmartML (Part of the SmartEco Ecosystem)

SmartML is a benchmarking-only tool I created purely to answer one question:

“If I benchmark models today, can I trust the results tomorrow?”

  • It’s not AutoML.
  • It’s not an optimizer.
  • It’s not a framework trying to be clever.

It’s just a transparent, deterministic, CPU-first benchmarking engine.

  • No innovation claims.
  • No magic.
  • Just honest evaluation.

Why This Exists (Especially for SmartKNN)

I originally built SmartML to benchmark SmartKNN properly.

But once the system was in place, it made sense to support:

  • Classical ML models
  • Tree-based models
  • Optional deep learning models
  • Research models (when available)

Right now, SmartML supports up to ~20 models, including both ML and DL models.

Some DL models:

  • Require different environments
  • May not install on Windows
  • May silently fail on CPU

So SmartML does not pretend they exist.


Runtime Model Detection (This Part Matters)

SmartML exposes a utility called:

SmartML_Inspect()
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This tells you:

  • Which classification models are available right now
  • Which regression models actually work in your environment
  • What metrics SmartML uses

No guessing.
No crashes.
No “works on my machine” nonsense.

If a model can’t run - it simply doesn’t appear.


What SmartML Actually Does

SmartML enforces:

  • Fixed random seeds
  • Deterministic train/test splits
  • Leakage-free encoding
  • Identical preprocessing across models
  • CPU-only execution by default
  • Real inference latency measurement

It measures:

  • Training time
  • Batch inference time
  • Batch throughput
  • Single-sample latency
  • P95 latency
  • Core accuracy / F1 / R² metrics

Same pipeline.
Same rules.
Every model


What SmartML Is Not

Let me be very clear:

  • No AutoML
  • No hyperparameter tuning
  • No leaderboard optimization
  • No claims of being “state of the art”

This is just a tool for benchmarking.

If you want to:

  • Benchmark Models at scale
  • Compare ML vs DL fairly on CPU
  • Run large experiments without rewriting pipelines
  • Trust your results next week

Then this might help.

If not - that’s totally fine too.


Using It (When You Need Scale)

For large benchmarks:

pip install SmartEco
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Then explore what’s available in your environment:

from SmartEco.SmartML import SmartML_Inspect
SmartML_Inspect()
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What’s Coming Next

  • Huge SmartKNN benchmarks (the original goal)
  • Public benchmark reports on the SmartEco website

Open & Honest

If you:

  • Use it
  • Break it
  • Add a model
  • Find a bug
  • Want something clearer
  • Open an issue or send a PR.

This is an engineering tool, not a product pitch.


Links

GitHub (SmartML):
Repo

Website (benchmarks & docs):
SmartEco

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