[Beowulf] Woodcrest Memory bandwidth

[Stuart Midgley]

actually, latency determines bandwidth more than memory speed...  see  
my rant(?) from a little over a year ago

http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2005-July/013294.html

prefetch etc. help, but the limiting factor is still latency.  Hence  
the opterons have significantly higher real memory bandwidth (their  
latency is about 1/3 that of xeons/p4's etc).  If you look at the  
ia64's then they have even high latency again, but they can have a  
huge number of outstanding loads (from memory its >80), so their  
effective bandwidth is high.

Stu.


On 15/08/2006, at 8:10, Joe Landman wrote:

> Hi Stu:
>
> Stu Midgley wrote:
>> sorry, forgot to reply all... don't you hate gmail's interface  
>> sometimes?
>>
>>
>> What is the memory latency of the woodcrest machines?  Since memory
>> latency really determines your memory bandwidth.
>
> Hmmm...  not for large block sequential accesses.  You can prefetch
> these assuming enough intelligence in the code generator (heh), or the
> hardware if the memory access pattern is fairly consistent.
>
> Latency really defines the random access local node GUPS, well, its
> really more complex than that, but roughly that.
>
> That said, I would like to measure this.  I have an old code which  
> does
> this, any pointers on code other people would like me to run?  If its
> not too hard (e.g. less than 15 minutes) I might do a few.
>
>> If Intel hasn't made any improvements in latency then the limited
>> number of out-standing loads in the x86-64 architecture will limit  
>> the
>> bandwidth regarless of the MB/s you throw at it.
>
> Hmmm... Ok, you are implying that if your processor can consume the
> load/store slots faster than it can launch them, and there are a  
> limited
> number of memory operations in flight (2? as I remember, not  
> looking at
> my notes now), it is going to be load-store pipeline limited, not
> necessarily "bandwidth".  That is, the memory system would be
> significantly faster than the CPU can consume.
>
> I haven't looked closely at the Woodcrest arch yet.  Don't know
> precisely what they are doing here and how it differs from AMD.  Would
> be interesting.  So far I haven't been impressed with code that I
> thought I should be really impressed with on this machine.  Oddly the
> performance was about what we got out of the Core Duo on this  
> platform.
>


--
Dr Stuart Midgley
Industry Uptake Program Leader
iVEC, 'The hub of advanced computing in Western Australia'
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