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.
GTX 1080 CUDA performance on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04) preliminary results (nbody and NAMD)
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 …
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.
NVIDIA CUDA with Ubuntu 16.04 beta on a laptop (if you just cannot wait)
I was preparing a Puget Systems Traverse Skylake based laptop for GPU accelerated molecular dynamics demos at the upcoming ACS meeting and decided to see if I could get Ubuntu 16.04 beta working with NVIDIA CUDA 7.5. It worked!
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
OpenACC for free! — NVIDIA OpenACC Toolkit
NVIDIA and PGI are offering “PGI Accelerator with OpenACC” free to academia (or 90 day trial for commercial users) under the banner “NVIDIA OpenACC Toolkit”. It’s about time!
Xeon Phi 5110p and Free Intel Parallel Studio Cluster Edition
Another amazing deal on Xeon Phi from Intel! This time you can get a 90% discount on a Phi 5110p and get the Intel Parallel Studio Cluster edition with a 1 year license for free.