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Subject: Re: Crafty and NUMA

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:05:43 09/03/03

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On September 03, 2003 at 00:15:32, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On September 02, 2003 at 22:46:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On September 02, 2003 at 18:26:44, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>>
>>>All I said is that being SMP doesn't magically make your latency better.  It
>>>depends on how the machine is built.  There's no reason a big NUMA machine
>>>couldn't be built where the average memory access wouldn't be as fast or faster
>>>than a similar-sized SMP machine.  There are several reasons why such a machine
>>>isn't built, but not a real technical reason.
>>
>>
>>The reason is $.  NUMA scales well with respect to price per additional CPU.
>>Crossbars to not.  It is possible to build a NUMA box that switches just as
>>fast as a Crossbar.  There's no reason to do so, because you end up with a
>>crossbar, and its associated high scaling cost.
>
>Exactly. :)
>
>As I've said, there's nothing that magically makes SMP *inherently* faster than
>NUMA.  Nothing more.


That's not what I said.  SMP _is_ inherently faster.  Because all memory has
the same access latency.  You _do_ have to share _something_ in a parallel
algorithm.  ANd whatever that is will be slower than doing the same thing on
a SMP box.  Even if it is just one word, the SMP box will access that one
word faster all around and the program will run faster.

Perhaps not a lot faster for 1 word of shared data.  But faster nonetheless.



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