Performance Variations using MPI/Myrico

[Steffen Persvold]

Patrick Geoffray wrote:
> > 3) Any ideas on what could cause this much variation?
> 
> I have some ideas, but nothing I would bet on. Mainly cache trashing : the
> memory copy operation is improved with SSE by using the prefecthing
> support, and this prefetch bypass the L2 cache. Without SSE, the L2 cache
> is happilly flushed as a processor is doing a copy. As the FFT code
> include a copy step, who knows... :-)

Hmm, the NAS application runs in userspace and since this inner loop (FFT code) runs without any communication with
other nodes, why would a SSE patched kernel improve it's memcpy performance. I would believe that the memcpy calls in
the FFT code was either inlined by the compiler, or that a call to libc's memcpy was made. It shouldn't involve any
system (kernel) time at all, right ?? 


Regards,
-- 
 Steffen Persvold                        Systems Engineer
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