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Subject: Re: Matt Taylor's magic de Bruijn Constant

Author: Eugene Nalimov

Date: 21:57:11 07/14/03

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On July 15, 2003 at 00:29:03, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 14, 2003 at 16:32:20, Eugene Nalimov wrote:
>
>>On July 14, 2003 at 16:07:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On July 14, 2003 at 15:33:37, Gerd Isenberg wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 14, 2003 at 10:54:49, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On July 13, 2003 at 17:10:10, Russell Reagan wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On July 13, 2003 at 13:17:56, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>It is used *extremely* intensive. Therefore I assumed that most of the time the
>>>>>>>table sits in cache. But apparently no... Makes you wonder about other simple
>>>>>>>lookup's. A lot of 10 cycle penalties, it seems.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Hi Bas,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Why you say "10 cycles"? I thought memory latency was many more cycles (~75 -
>>>>>>150+).
>>>>>
>>>>>Random read from memory at dual P4 or dual K7 is like nearly 400 nanoseconds.
>>>>>So that's at 2Ghz around 800 cycles.
>>>>>
>>>>>Best regards,
>>>>>Vincent
>>>>
>>>>Hi Vincent,
>>>>
>>>>puhh... that's about 1/2 microsecond. I remember the days with
>>>>2MHz - 8085 or Z80 CPU - can't beleave it. A few questions...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Don't believe it because it is _wrong_.  Run "lm-bench" on your computer.
>>>It will very accurately measure random access latency.  The slowest I have
>>>seen is 150ns on my dual, using registered DDRAM.  My laptop uses SDRAM and
>>>clocks in around 120ns.  My quad xeons are all around 125ns.
>>>
>>>I've not seen any 400+ ns numbers although it is very possible that rambus
>>>might be that slow on latency, although it is very fast on bandwidth.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>I'm not familar with dual-architectures. Is it a kind of shared memory via
>>>>pci-bus? How do you access such ram - are the some alloc like api-functions?
>>>>What happens, if one perocessor writes this memory through cache - what about
>>>>possible cache copies of this address in the other processor, or in general how
>>>>do the severel processor caches syncronise?
>>>>I guess each processor has it's own local main-memory.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>No.  Each processor sits on the same bus with memory.  So both can access
>>>it independently.  However, cache coherency is a problem, but in the Intel
>>>world it is handled by some clever cache design so that the cache controllers
>>>are aware of what is being done by the "other cache" and knows when the other
>>>cache modifies a value that is in the local cache.  It's messy, but it works.
>>>
>>>Caches still use write-back update policy so that memory is not updated until
>>>the cache line (Modified cache line) is about to be overwritten.  However, if
>>>two caches have the same cache line (memory addresses) and one modifies any of
>>>the cache line, the other invalidates its copy so the next read will refresh
>>>things correctly.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>Do you know the read latencies of single processor P4 or K7 with state of the
>>>>art chipsets?
>>>
>>>
>>>Typical numbers are in the 120-150ns range.  Lower for non-registered type
>>>memory.  Registered memory is mainly used in duals that are set up as servers,
>>>for higher reliability.
>>>
>>>Aaron has a sub-75ns latency machine that is overclocked.  That's the fastest
>>>PC latency I have ever seen.  In fact, it is probably the fastest latency of
>>>any kind I have seen, period.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>1.) if data is already in 1. level cache
>>>
>>>This is a one-cycle deal.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>2.) if data is in 2. level cache but not in 1.
>>>
>>>This is something like 6 cycles but I don't think there is a standard
>>>"number" here since processor speeds vary so much.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>3.) in worst case, if data is only in main memory but in no cache
>>>
>>>125ns is a good first approximation.
>>
>>I had seen 700+ ns on a 32-way system. But that was a worst case, and changes in
>>the program helped -- read-only data was moved in a separate cache line, and
>>algorithm was changed to allow each CPU have its own writable data that are
>>merged together from time to time.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Eugene
>
>I haven't played with any 32 cpu PC-type machines.  However, I have played
>with several NUMA machines and obviously the farther away the memory, the
>longer the latency.  This was a characteristic of the first connection
>machine, for example.

That wasn't PC-class machine :-) And latency under high load was much worse than
documented one, probably because of all the extra traffic on the buses, cache
coherence overhead, etc.

Thanks,
Eugene

>However, I have no idea where vincent gets his 450ns for duals.  The slowest
>I have seen is 150.
>
>>
>>>You can answer _all_ of the above by running lm-bench.  It will tell
>>>you each one of those numbers, plus others.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>Thanks in advance,
>>>>Gerd



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