Quote Originally Posted by alpha754293 View Post
Well, if you need another quad-socket system to test stuff with, my quad dual-core (8-cores total) at home that's available. It's not the fastest system by any stretch of the imagination now, and I'll still have access to my 48-core system at work for about another week (I'm switching jobs).

And you're actually pretty good at explaining stuff. Better than most profs and even some programmers that I've met before. I'm pretty sure that you have a pretty good idea what you're talking about because otherwise, you probably wouldn't be writing the programs and doing what it is that you're doing. (Last I recall, you're doing your grad school...so I'd presume that you gotta know SOMETHING.)
Well, I may be in grad school, but I'm still just a first year... There's still a lot I don't know - especially supercomputer related things.
The only difference between me and other grad students is that I have a bunch of machines to toy with. Everyone else needs to share the school's resources.
And there's a lot you can't do when you don't have root or physical access to a machine you're trying to study.

Stuff like playing with the CPU clock, messing with memory timings, enabling/disabling cores... are some of the unconventional things I do to see what's going on in a program.

If you try that on a school machine, you'll get expelled.


And I have some good news for the AMD fans...

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 fixes the bug that was miscompiling AVX.

It looks like I have a Windows binary that will run on Bulldozer.
Interestingly, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 compiles a faster AVX binary than the Intel Compiler (about 1% faster)...

Also, VS 2010 SP1 has support for FMA4 and XOP instructions. But since I don't plan on building another rig for a while, I won't be able to add support for FMA4 and XOP anytime soon.