On 2/11/2010 6:35 AM, Edwin Bennink wrote:
Thanks Tim, I thought that the gcc list was the most appropriate one
regarding the gomp implementation, but I'll post this question on the
gcc-help list.
By the way, Ubuntu 9.10 is the latest version (dd Oct. 2009). HTT
works fine for daily use, but massive parallel applications show some
odd behaviour:
Depending on the structure of the algorithm some pieces of code run
significantly faster (about 10%) with HTT enabled, while other pieces
of code run slower (some more than 50%). This slowdown happens due to
parallel sections inside loops...
Edwin
Sorry for getting confused about Ubuntu version dates.
A requirement for setting GOMP_CPU_AFFINITY for performance with HT is
expected. Adjacent threads might be expected to touch some of the same
cache lines, so they must be run by sibling logical processors which
share the same cache.
The only OpenMP library I have seen which makes affinity setting a
default is the one from PGI, and that tactic is inflexible. Intel
compilers have a seldom used option to set such a default.
If you have the libiomp for Intel OpenMP, running with that library in
place of libgomp might be an interesting comparison.
Among the situations which might make HT run slowly even with
appropriate affinity could be cache and TLB capacity shortage, or all
hot code sections depending on a shared resource such as FPU, or lack of
cache locality (inner loops not stride 1).
The Intel MKL library tries to detect HT and (by default) use 1 thread
maximum per core.
--
Tim Prince
