Paul Hinker's Weblog

Dual-Core Amd performance of Perflib

I recently got some quality time on a Galaxy2 machine with 285 CPUs. This machine has two CPUs each which has 2 cores. The machine is clocked at 2.6 Ghz and had 16 Gb of RAM. I ran the Linpack benchmark using the Sun Studio 11 compiler. The Sun Performance Library comes packaged with the compiler collection and was used when building the Linpack executable. The results are as follows:

Size	Sun Studio11
1000	3343.33
2000	3815.24
3000	3942.67
4000	3983.08
5000	4024.29
6000	4029.99
7000	4060.43
8000	4065.5
9000	4052.7
10000	4027.53

These numbers are not great and after using the collect/analyzer (which incidentally also comes packaged with the Sun Studio Compiler Collection). Brad Lewis was able to make some changes to the algorithm to increase performance.

Size	Sun Studio11	Sun Studio 11u1
1000	3343.33	3714.81
2000	3815.24	4205.77
3000	3942.67	4320.86
4000	3983.08	4379.35
5000	4024.29	4423.52
6000	4029.99	4423.46
7000	4060.43	4467.19
8000	4065.5	4468.22
9000	4052.7	4463.48
10000	4027.53	4461.84

This shows a nearly 10% performance improvement and the changes will be incorporated into an upcoming performnace patch to the Sun Studio 11 compiler collection version of the Performance Library.

These are obviously scalar performance numbers which are interesting but do not address some of the questions one might have concerning how things scale on a machine that has multi-core processors. In upcoming entries, I'll present some of the multi-core numbers obtained on this machine and a 4 Cpu, dual-core Amd box.

Posted at 10:50AM Jan 17, 2006 by hinkthink in General  |