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
STREAM benchmark
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
Some comments on the Xeon Phi coprocessor
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