As many of you know, the Texas Advanced Computing Center is in the midst of installing “Stampede” — a large supercomputer using both Intel Xeon E5 (“Sandy Bridge”) and Intel Xeon Phi (aka “MIC”, aka “Knights Corner”) processors. In his blog “The Perils of Parallel”, Greg Pfister commented on the… read more
memory bandwidth
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
Optimizing AMD Opteron Memory Bandwidth, Part 5: single-thread, read-only
Single Thread, Read Only Results Comparison Across Systems In Part1, Part2, Part3, and Part4, I reviewed performance issues for a single-thread program executing a long vector sum-reduction — a single-array read-only computational kernel — on a 2-socket system with a pair of AMD Family10h Opteron Revision C2 (“Shanghai”) quad-core processors.… read more