When attempting to build heterogeneous computers with “accelerators” or “coprocessors” on PCIe interfaces, one quickly runs into asymmetries between the data transfer capabilities of processors and IO devices. These asymmetries are often surprising — the tremendously complex processor is actually less capable of generating precisely controlled high-performance IO transactions than… read more
STREAM version 5.10 released
After much too long a delay, version 5.10 of the STREAM benchmark has been released (at least in the C language version). Although version 5.10 of the benchmark still measures exactly the same thing as previous versions, a number of long-awaited features have finally been integrated. Updated Validation Code Array… read more
Counting binary vs decimal powers in the STREAM benchmark
A question came up recently about my choice of definitions for “MB” used in the computation of memory bandwidth (in “MB/s”) in the STREAM benchmark. According to this reference from NIST, the convention is: Binary Powers Value abbreviation full name 2^10 1,024 KiB kibibyte 2^20 1,048,576 MiB mebibyte 2^30 1,073,741,824… read more