Now that we ve defined weak scaling and the workload, it s time to dig into what might be going wrong. In the last part we identified shared resources across software threads and hardware cores as a potential source of problems for weak scaling. I ve come up with a table with all the shared resources I can [ ]
Blindly scaling software is hard and often unpleasant. This multi-part blog post defines and debugs a weak scaling performance problem on a multi-core CPU. A lot of software performance work revolves around the reduction of latency as a means of achieving a particular performance target. Latency is the time that it takes from start to [ ]
Branch instructions are the primary means by which a program running on a CPU makes a decision. This post is part of a series of posts on CPU performance, as part of the Pointer Wars: Linked List Edition challenge. This challenge is great for undergraduates, graduate students, and new engineers who want feedback about writing [ ]
Dynamic memory allocation isn t free. Today I discuss a means of reducing the frequency of it for a breadth first search algorithm. This is part of an ongoing series of posts relating to the high performance C programming challenge Pointer Wars. Come join us! The Pointer Wars challenge has four levels to it. Level 2 [ ]
Starts up again August 1st (sign up through Aug 15th) and runs through November 1st! Let us know if you want to join in the fun on this Google form! Pointer Wars: Linked List Edition is a high quality, high performance C or C++ challenge, consisting of four levels to accomplish. Levels 1 and 2 [ ]
Dynamic memory allocation is often treated as being free by programmers. It isn t. For our first batch of participants, week 1 of high-performance C competition Pointer Wars: Linked List Edition is complete (for those curious, you can still join!). Code has been reviewed, microbenchmarks ran, and performance results delivered. A few people even had code [ ]
The initial, ongoing, run of Pointer Wars was phenomenal. We received 34 contestants of all skill levels, and have seen some phenomenal code. Now, my wife and I are expanding it more. We ve changed it from a competition to a challenge, and participants starting on June 15th have through September 15th to complete four coding [ ]
The Week 1 repository is now live on Github! There s still time to join, cost is $25, link here. This Week s Tasks The task for this week is to implement all of the functions declared in linked_list.h and have them pass all of the functional tests in the provided functional test suite. Once that is [ ]
The response to my last post on the new C programming competition has been immense. So far we re up to 9 participants (about eight more than my wife and I expected), and counting! Pointer Wars: Linked List edition is designed to have the competitors code a linked list in C under a variety of interesting [ ]
This summer my wife and I are holding a competition: who can write the fastest C-based linked list? Your goal is to write a linked list, and code that does various tasks with said list. Other than having to be a linked list, having it being written in C (although if we have enough demand [ ]