Quote Originally Posted by poke349 View Post
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.
Quote Originally Posted by skycrane
....1.4x speed up...
Really? AVX makes that much of a difference?

Hmm....I wonder if programs like LINPACK would be able to pick up/use that difference?

Way I look at it - there's always going to be someone who knows more than I do, and there's A LOT of people who know less. (It isn't an ego thing, it's a reality thing, or so I've been told. I'm usually too busy doing my own thing to notice anyways...or care.)

I still wonder why don't you go with something like PGI or Pathscale or some of the more "generic" (less stupid/specific) compilers?

Haha...I got kicked off the school systems for a while because I was running the distributed.net client on their Sun SPARC servers. Then I was like "screw this" and ran it on my home systems instead cuz it was faster. When I went to re-activate my account, they're like "it looks like you're blocked. Hmmm...I dunno why." and I'm like "*shrug* I unno either..." LOL

Stupid class that actually needed access to the labs.