In an earlier post, I documented the local and remote memory latencies for the SunBlade X6420 compute nodes in the TACC Ranger supercomputer, using AMD Opteron “Barcelona” (model 8356) processors running at 2.3 GHz. Similar latency tests were run on other systems based on AMD Opteron processors in the TACC… read more
Computer Hardware
TACC Ranger Node Local and Remote Memory Latency Tables
In the previous post, I published my best set of numbers for local memory latency on a variety of AMD Opteron system configurations. Here I expand that to include remote memory latency on some of the systems that I have available for testing. Ranger is the oldest system still operational… read more
What good are “Large Pages” ?
I am often asked what “Large Pages” in computer systems are good for. For commodity (x86_64) processors, “small pages” are 4KiB, while “large pages” are (typically) 2MiB. The size of the page controls how many bits are translated between virtual and physical addresses, and so represent a trade-off between what… read more