4 ms·

The point of most cloud servers is to abstract away the kind of low level architectural details you are looking at here, so kind of opposing goals.. why not jus

The point of most cloud servers is to abstract away the kind of low level architectural details you are looking at here, so kind of opposing goals.. why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there? It is not expensive, maybe $800 tops and you get a nice development rig in the process.

nkurz 11y ago
Why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there? Because I've already got a nice laptop, and several underutilized older servers. I'd like to test on Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, ARM, and Power8. The older Intel processors are easily available, https://www.runabove.com/ https://www.runabove.com/ gives me access to Power8 (and supposedly ARM, although I haven't tried it yet), but I haven't yet found inexpensive ways to test on Broadwell and Skylake. For this particular case, I was hoping to just spend a few hours testing some SIMD variants of this: http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ The Haswell performance is disappointing, but I think that's because the Haswell AVX2 gather performance is poor but Skylake is supposedly much better. See the link I gave earlier for details.
- i336_ 11y ago
  I checked RunAbove with great curiosity, but the site seems to be indicating that the Power8 option is unavailable / "closed". Does this mean all new projects are rejected, that they're trying to halt new applications, or what? Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h' (Slackware 14.1, procps 3.2.8, manpage says "Cohesive Systems / 20 Mar 1993").
  - nkurz 11y ago
    I checked RunAbove with great curiosity, but the site seems to be indicating that the Power8 option is unavailable / "closed". I'm not sure. I signed up during a Beta window last year, and don't know where they are going with it overall. Also, I haven't used it in a few months, and when I tried right now I got errors on creating a new instance. I opened a support ticket. Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h' No, I'm not the author. Searching though, it looks like "-h" is a synonym for "human readable" on some distributions, and just does automatic units.
    - nkurz 11y ago
      I fear that RunAbove is no longer a viable way of testing on Power8. The response to my trouble ticket was so unhelpful that it did not even confirm whether they still expect a Power8 instance to start. Instead, they just referred me to the community support which consists of lots of unanswered questions with the same symptoms. I would suggest avoiding RunAbove altogether -- truly abysmal service.

nkurz 11y ago

Why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there? Because I've already got a nice laptop, and several underutilized older servers. I'd like to test on Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, ARM, and Power8. The older Intel processors are easily available, https://www.runabove.com/ https://www.runabove.com/ gives me access to Power8 (and supposedly ARM, although I haven't tried it yet), but I haven't yet found inexpensive ways to test on Broadwell and Skylake. For this particular case, I was hoping to just spend a few hours testing some SIMD variants of this: http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ The Haswell performance is disappointing, but I think that's because the Haswell AVX2 gather performance is poor but Skylake is supposedly much better. See the link I gave earlier for details.

i336_ 11y ago
I checked RunAbove with great curiosity, but the site seems to be indicating that the Power8 option is unavailable / "closed". Does this mean all new projects are rejected, that they're trying to halt new applications, or what? Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h' (Slackware 14.1, procps 3.2.8, manpage says "Cohesive Systems / 20 Mar 1993").
- nkurz 11y ago
  I checked RunAbove with great curiosity, but the site seems to be indicating that the Power8 option is unavailable / "closed". I'm not sure. I signed up during a Beta window last year, and don't know where they are going with it overall. Also, I haven't used it in a few months, and when I tried right now I got errors on creating a new instance. I opened a support ticket. Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h' No, I'm not the author. Searching though, it looks like "-h" is a synonym for "human readable" on some distributions, and just does automatic units.
  - nkurz 11y ago
    I fear that RunAbove is no longer a viable way of testing on Power8. The response to my trouble ticket was so unhelpful that it did not even confirm whether they still expect a Power8 instance to start. Instead, they just referred me to the community support which consists of lots of unanswered questions with the same symptoms. I would suggest avoiding RunAbove altogether -- truly abysmal service.