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.
Intel Core-i9 7900X and 7980XE are very good desktop processors for mathematical computing workloads. This post is a short listing of results for the Linpack benchmark which is still my personal favorite CPU performance metric.
You got your new wonderful NVIDIA Pascal GPU … maybe a GTX 1080, 1070, or Titan X(P) … And, you want to setup a CUDA environment for some dev work or maybe try some “machine learning” code with your new card. What are you going to do? At the time of this writing CUDA 8 is still in RC and the deb and rpm packages have drivers that don’t work with Pascal. I’ll walk through the tricks you need to do a manual setup of CUDA 7.5 and 8.0 on top of Ubuntu 16.04 or 14.04 that will work with the new Pascal based GPU’s
I have a Titan Black, Titan X (Maxwell) and a new Titan X (Pascal) in a system for a quick CUDA performance test. Install is on Ubuntu 16.04 with CUDA 8.0rc. We’ll look at nbody from the CUDA samples code and NAMD Molecular Dynamics. It is stunning to see how much the CUDA performance has increased on these wonderful GPU’s in just 3 years.
NVIDIA has just launched the GTX 980 Ti and I got to run some benchmarks on one. How is the Linux CUDA performance? Almost as good as the TitanX! This is another great card from NVIDIA for single precision compute loads. We’ve got some number to show it.
POV-ray is an open source ray tracing package with a long history. It has been a favorite system performance testing package since it’s inception because of the heavy load it places on the CPU. It has had an SMP parallel implementation since the mid 2000’s and is often used as a multi-core CPU parallel performance benchmark on both Linux and Windows.
So lets try it on our Quad socket many-core systems!
Hyper-Threading, hyperthreading, or just HT for short, has been around on Intel processors for over a decade and it still confuses people. I’m not going to do much to help with the confusion. I just want to point out an example from some testing I was doing recently with the ray-tracing application POV-ray that surprised me. Hyper-threading dramatically lowered the performance on a multi-core test system running Windows when running POV-ray in parallel.
The annual Northwest pilgrimage for the Linux faithful to the Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA is nearly upon us! Puget Systems is donating a great machine to the raffle, a Serenity mini with a commemorative case etching!
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