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Date:      Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:47:46 -0700
From:      Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd@gmail.com>
To:        Maho NAKATA <chat95@mac.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Only 70% of theoretical peak performance on FreeBSD 8/amd64,  Corei7 920
Message-ID:  <u2q7d6fde3d1004112147t29915255nd6347d87e66d9dab@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100412.131213.4959786962516027.chat95@mac.com>
References:  <20100412.131213.4959786962516027.chat95@mac.com>

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On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Maho NAKATA <chat95@mac.com> wrote:
> Hi FreeBSD developers,
> [the original article in Japanese can be found at
> http://blog.goo.ne.jp/nakatamaho/e/b5f6fbc3cc6e1ac4947463eb1ca4eb0a ]
>
> *Abstract*
> I compared the peak performance of FreeBSD 8.0/amd64 and Ubuntu 9.10 amd6=
4 using dgemm
> (a linear algebra routine, matrix-matrix multiplication).
> I obtained only 70% of theoretical peak performance on FreeBSD 8/amd64 an=
d
> almost 95% on Ubuntu 9.10 /amd64. I'm really disappointed.
>
> *Introduction*
> I'm a friend of Gotoh Kazushige, the principal developers of GotoBLAS. He=
 told me that
> FreeBSD is not suitable OS for scientific computing or high performance c=
omputing. He says
> (in Japanese and my translation):
>
>> I guess FreeBSD does page coloring, but I don't think FreeBSD considers =
very large cache
>> size which recent CPU has. Support of a very large cache on Linux is sti=
ll not very will
>> sophisticated, but on *BSDs, its worst; they uses too fine memory alloca=
tion method,
>> so we cannot expect large continuous physical memory allocation.
>> Moreover, process scheduling is not so nice as *BSD employs an algorithm=
 that
>> changes physical CPUs in turn instead of allocating one core for such ki=
nd of jobs.
>> Take your own benchmark, and you'll see..
>
> *Result*
> Machine: Core i7 920 (42.56-44.8Gflops) / DDR3 1066
> OS: FreeBSD 8.0/amd64 and Ubuntu 9.10
> GotoBLAS2: 1.13
>
> dgemm result
> OS =A0 =A0 =A0: FLOPS =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 : percent in peak
> FreeBSD : 32.0 GFlops =A0 =A0 : 71%
> Ubuntu =A0: 42.0-42.7GFlops : 93.8%-95.3%

    I'm not sure if this is the exact issue, but it might be a point
of reference worth investigating:
    http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2010-March/031004.ht=
ml
Thanks,
-Garrett



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