3 ms·
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 t
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.