Does Enabling WSL2 Affect Performance of Windows 10 Applications

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.

Intel Xeon E5 v4 Broadwell Buyers Guide (Parallel Performance)

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.

NAMD Molecular Dynamics Performance on NVIDIA GTX 1080 and 1070 GPU

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.

Intel Broadwell Xeon E5 2600v4 performance test

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.

Windows 10 with Xeon Phi

Can you use an Intel Xeon Phi with Windows 10? Yes, you can. However, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should do it! I did a set up and a little testing mainly just to see if it would work — it does!

Molecular Dynamics Performance on GPU Workstations — NAMD

Molecular Dynamics programs can achieve very good performance on modern GPU accelerated workstations giving job performance that was only achievable using CPU compute clusters only a few years ago. The group at UIUC working on NAMD were early pioneers of using GPU’s for compute acceleration and NAMD has very good performance acceleration using NVIDIA CUDA. We show you how good that performance is on modern Nvidia GPU’s