NVIDIA GTC 2023 was outstanding! To say that about a virtual conference tells you how much I value it. This post is largely a catalog of the talks I found interesting along with titles that I think will be interesting to a larger audience and my colleagues at Puget Systems.
I was prompted to do some testing by a commenter on one of my recent posts. They had concerns about problems with dual NVIDIA RTX4090s on AMD Threadripper Pro platforms. I ran some applications to reproduce the problems reported above and tried to dig deeper into the issues with more extensive testing. The included table below tells all!
WSL2 offers improved performance over version 1 by providing more direct access to the host hardware drivers. Recent “Insider Dev Channel” builds of Win10 even allows access to the Windows NVIDIA display driver for GPU computing applications for WSL2 Linux applications! The performance improvements with WSL2 are largely because this version is running as a privileged virtual machine on to of MS Hyper-V. This means that at least low level support for the Hyper-V virtualization layer needs to be enabled to use it. In particular, the Windows feature “VirtualMachinePlatform” must be enabled for WSL2. We tested to see if there was any negative application performance impact.
Starting 2020 off with an addition to my writing, “micro blogging” via GitHub Gists
New Years resolutions are notorious for being overly ambitious, vague, and quickly forgotten.But, I’m not going to let that stop me from making some! In order to keep myself from forgetting what I resolve to do I’m going to write them down in public! These are my resolutions for when I’m wearing my System Administrator and Developer hats.
I’ve been exposed to enough computing “teasers” in 2017 that I feel I can stick my neck out a little and make some predictions for 2018. Some of these are pretty wild i.e. unlikely but I want to put them out there anyway.
Intel’s Xeon E5 v4 processors are available and there are lots of them! The changes from the v3 Haswell are mostly small clock changes and increases in core count. You can now get a E5-2699v4 with 22 cores. In a dual socket system that’s 44 cores to work with. If the programs you want to run scale well with thread count then that could be a great processor for you. However, if your parallel scaling is not near linear then it may not be the best value. We have a dynamic chart of performance based on Amdahl’s Law that may help you decide which processor is best for your uses.
The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPU’s are out and I’ve received a lot of questions about NAMD performance. The short answer is — performance is great! I’ve got some numbers to back that up below. We’ve got new Broadwell Xeon and Core-i7 CPU’s thrown into the mix too. The new hardware refresh gives a nice step up in performance.
Just got a NVIDIA GTX 1080 for testing. I hacked up an install with Ubuntu 16.04 and CUDA 7.5 along with a beta display driver that works! First run after compiling the cuda samples nbody gave 5816 GFLOP/s! A GTX 980 on the same system does 2572 GFLOP/s. However, it’s not all good news …
The Intel Xeon E5 2600 v4 Broadwell processors are finally available. My first Linpack testing with a E5-2687W v4 shows a greater than 35% performance increase over the v3 Haswell version! And, it’s the same price as the v3 version! It’s significantly better than expected.
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