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Subject: Re: UltraSPARC III sucks

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 07:09:06 01/03/02

Go up one level in this thread


On January 02, 2002 at 23:06:29, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 02, 2002 at 16:21:43, David Rasmussen wrote:
>
>>On January 02, 2002 at 16:17:31, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On January 02, 2002 at 15:41:41, Peter Berger wrote:
>>>
>>>>On January 02, 2002 at 15:34:55, David Rasmussen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I've tried running Crafty at my universitys multiprocessor machines, with poor
>>>>>results. Using 4 processors was kind of ok, but not great (~750 knps), but using
>>>>>many more processors (16, 24, etc.) just made it slower. How crummy is that.
>>>>>
>>>>>/David
>>>>
>>>>Are you sure? Sparc processors usually scale very well.
>>>>
>>>>If it really became worse I'd suspect a problem with Crafty.
>>>
>>>No.. it is a problem with memory bandwidth.  The sparc is too slow
>>>and the crossbar is even slower...  If you don't run out of the cache,
>>>you get killed on memory bandwidth with large numbers of processors...
>>>
>>>>
>>>>OK, a silly question: did you remember to recompile Crafty so that it really
>>>>could use all those processors?
>>>
>>>That is a good point, with -DCPUS=128 or something similar...
>>>Otherwise most processors will be spinning and eating bandwidth for
>>>nothing...
>>>
>>>
>>
>>I did that already.
>>
>>I really don't understand how the Sparcs can be _that_ bad. I mean, they are
>>used at my university for large mathematical problems using lots of RAM and
>>processors, and they _do_ scale. Otherwise they wouldn't have bought such an
>>expensive machine, let alone more than one of them.
>>
>>/David
>
>
>It is almost certainly a horrible MUTEX implementation.  POSIX threads does
>terribly on Linux if I have to use the normal MUTEX (pthread_lock()) stuff.
>The spinlocks I use make everything work.  Although since I no longer have to
>lock the hash stuff, there are not a lot of locks left in Crafty so this might
>not be true as I haven't tested it in a long while...

Don't complain about that only, modify the splitting i'd say. Split
less near the leafs :)

Note that you don't lock hashtable which would give some rights
to complain :)



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