Chromebooks can now run Linux without dual-booting via Crouton (ChRomium Os Universal chrooT envirONment)! A big advantage of Crouton is that users don't have to reboot their machine to switch operating systems. Moving to Linux can be as simple as using a keyboard shortcut. Crouton can be downloaded from github (). Crouton is a set of scripts that act as an easy-to-use, … [Read more...]
Seismic Changes in the Animation Industry
TechEnablement caught up with DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen after his plenary invited talk at SC14. We had the opportunity to ask Lincoln about our observation of seismic changes happening within the animation industry as technology enables small and mid-sized businesses to create studio quality animated characters for television, augmented reality, and eventually for movies … [Read more...]
Morton Order Improves Performance
Author Kerry Evans writes in his High Performance Parallelism Pearls chapter, "There are many facets to performance optimization but three issues to deal with right from the beginning are memory access, vectorization, and parallelization. Unless we can optimize these, we cannot achieve peak performance.” Specifically, this chapter examines a method of mapping multidimensional … [Read more...]
Sparse matrix-vector multiplication: parallelization and vectorization
The chapter authors (Albert-Jan N. Yzelman, Dirk Roose, and Karl Meerbergen) note that, "Current hardware trends lead to an increasing width of vector units as well as to decreasing effective bandwidth-per-core. For sparse computations these two trends conflict.” For this reason they designed a usable and efficient data structure for vectorized sparse computations on … [Read more...]
Scalable Out-Of-Core Solvers On A Cluster
This chapters documents the implementation of a parallel distributed memory out-of-core (OOC) solver for performing LU and Cholesky factorizations of a large dense matrix on clusters equipped with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The code was ported from CUDA with high-level library routines in CUBLAS This matches well with the offload model for the coprocessor using the … [Read more...]
Heterogeneous MPI Optimization With ITAC
This chapter focuses on the workload balance of MPI applications running in heterogeneous cluster environment consisting of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors in a financial industry application that calculates Asian option payoffs. Three cases are considered: unbalanced symmetric MPI code, manual balancing with pre-calculated performances of the cluster … [Read more...]
Profiling Guided Optimization On Intel Xeon Phi
This chapter in High Performance Parallelism Pearls by Andrey Vladimirov focuses on the use of Intel VTune Amplifier XE reports to understand where to apply optimization on matrix transposition, a small and self-contained workload of great practical value. The optimization process applied to the code relies exclusively on programming in a high-level language plus utilization of … [Read more...]
Characterization And Optimization Methodology Applied To Stencil Computations
The chapter discuss characterization and optimization methodology applied to a 3D finite differences (3DFD) algorithm used to solve constant or variable density isotropic acoustic wave equation (Iso3DFD). From an unoptimized version to the most optimized, the authors achieved a six-fold performance improvement on Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 processors and a nearly thirty-fold … [Read more...]
Portable Performance with OpenCL On Intel Xeon Phi
This High Performance Parallelism Pearl show the potential for using the OpenCL™ standard parallel programming language to deliver portable performance on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, Xeon processors, and many-core devices such as GPUs from multiple vendors. This portable performance can be delivered from a single program without needing multiple versions of the code, an … [Read more...]
High Performance Ray Tracing With Embree On Intel Xeon Phi
Ray tracing is a technique for generating images of synthetic scenes. Because ray tracing simulates the physics of light transport in the real world, it can be used to achieve high quality and even photorealistic results. The chapter authors in High Performance Parallelism Pearls describe how the Intel Embree ray tracing kernel library can be used to achieve high performance … [Read more...]