Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Wednesday November 11, 2009

Sun Studio OpenMP gets 12x improvement on Seismic benchmark on SLES10
This story is hard to pass up:  Sun's BestPerf blog (read the details here) recently reported how they got a 12x performance improvement over a single-threaded version on an important Seismic (Reverse Time Migration) benchmark using Sun Studio's OpenMP feature on SLES10. Its a great story of how Sun can deliver performance through a combination of Sun Studio and new Hardware (via Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array). Yes, this is the same Flash Array that has been the talk of the town and has notched up several World Record wins.
Several points come to mind:

• Sun Studio and OpenMP are key to exploiting parallel performance. Not just with Flash, but also with multiple cores now becoming the mainstay in chip offerings. Multi-threading, parallel performance (and parallel programming, for those who are willing to take the effort) is going to be even more critical to fully utilize system resources now and into the future.
• Sun Studio performance here is highlighted on SuSE 10. Note this, because I've had to defended the impression that Sun Studio doesnt do as well on Linux; it does. Sun Studio does not leave any performance, features, tools, options, optimizations out of its offering on Linux.
• The Flash Array Storage alone gets a 2.2x performance win over 15K disks. But the combination with Sun Studio in achieving parallelism that the Flash Array Storage can exploit is even more attractive.

Like this post?   bookmark it   |    digg it   |   slashdot it   |   Technorati it