09 June 2009
Parallel Scalability Isn’t Child’s Play, Part 3: The Problem with Fine-Grained Parallelism
In the last blog entry in this series , I introduced the model for parallel program scalability proposed by Neil Gunther, which I praised for being a realistic antidote to more optimistic, but better known, formulas. Gunther’s model adds a new parameter Read More...
1 Comments  
02 May 2009
Are we taking advantage of Parallelism?
Recently, a colleague of mine, Mark Friedman, posted a blog titled “ Parallel Scalability Isn’t Child’s Play ” in which he reviewed the merits of Amdahl Law vs. Gunther’s Law for determining the practical limits to parallelization. I would not argue with Read More...
1 Comments  
29 April 2009
Parallel Scalability Isn’t Child’s Play, Part 2: Amdahl’s Law vs. Gunther’s Law
Part 1 of this series of blog entries discussed results from simulating the performance of a massively parallel SIMD application on several alternative multi-core architectures. These results were reported by researchers at Sandia Labs and publicized Read More...
4 Comments  
16 March 2009
Parallel Scalability Isn’t Child’s Play
In a recent blog entry , Dr. Neil Gunther, a colleague from the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), warned about unrealistic expectations being raised with regard to the performance of parallel programs on current multi-core hardware. Neil’s blog entry Read More...
9 Comments  
23 December 2008
Visual Studio 2010 Hardware Requirements
Soma’s been talking about the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release on his blog , which means I’m starting to get questions about what type of hardware you’re going to need to run VS2010 on. Unfortunately, I can’t give you an official answer yet (other Read More...
12 Comments  
22 October 2008
PDC2008 preConference Workshop
Over the past several weeks, I have been working overtime developing a presentation on web application performance to be given at the upcoming Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), which is next week in Los Angeles. This is partly why I have been Read More...
0 Comments  
18 September 2008
Mainstream NUMA and the TCP/IP stack: Final Thoughts
This is a continuation of Part IV of this article posted here . Note that a final version of a white paper tying this series of five blog entries together (and a Powerpoint presentation on the subject) are attached. For many years, the effort to improve Read More...
5 Comments  
Attachment(s):http://cid-12a53f90793d2c8b.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/DDPEBlogImages/Presentations%20and%20Papers/Mainstream%20NUMA%20and%20the%20TCP%20|5CMG%20paper%208220%20draft|6.docx
09 September 2008
Mainstream NUMA and the TCP/IP stack, Part IV: Parallelizing TCP/IP
This is a continuation of Part III of this article posted here . In the many-core era, the host processor overhead associated with processing TCP/IP interrupts is not a capacity problem, since CPU cycles on the host computer are plentiful and becoming Read More...
2 Comments
 
13 August 2008
Performance improvements in Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5
We just announced the release of Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 . A major push for this release was continuing to enhance performance and reliability, as Soma noted in his most recent blog entry . I want to take a minute to drill into the Read More...
6 Comments
 
06 August 2008
Mainstream NUMA and the TCP/IP stack, Part III: A look back at older strategies to scale high-speed networking
This is a continuation of Part II of this article posted here . By necessity, both the hardware and the software devoted to processing network traffic need to evolve in the many-core era to become multiprocessor-oriented. On servers that have NUMA architectures, Read More...
2 Comments
 
27 July 2008
Mainstream NUMA & the TCP/IP stack: Part 2: Programming ccNUMA machines
This is a continuation of Part I of this article posted here . In Part 1 of this article, we looked at the capacity issues that are driving architectural changes in the TCP/IP networking stack. While network interfaces are increasing in throughput capacity, Read More...
1 Comments  
18 June 2008
Lessons from the test lab: investigating a pleasant surprise
This post describes our recent investigation into an interesting performance problem: benchmarks that we were surprised to find running significantly faster than we expected on new hardware. Along the way we discuss useful benchmarking tools, how to validate Read More...
8 Comments  
10 June 2008
Mainstream NUMA and the TCP/IP stack: Part I.
One of the intriguing aspects of the onset of the many-core processor era is the necessity of using parallel programming techniques to reap the performance benefits of this and future generations of processor chips. Instead of significantly faster processors, Read More...
8 Comments  
02 June 2008
Introduction to Control Theory and Its Application to Computing Systems -- Part 1
Part 1 of the slide presentation. Read More...
2 Comments  
Attachment(s):Sigmetrics Tutorial On Control Engineering -- Part 1 - Introduction.pptx
02 June 2008
Introduction to Control Theory and Its Application to Computing Systems -- Part 2
Part 2 of the slide presentation. Read More...
0 Comments  
Attachment(s):Sigmetrics Tutorial on Control Engineering -- Part 2 - Self-Tuning Memory Management.ppt
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