Topic: "Making use of SIMD Vectorisation to Improve Code Performance"

Speaker: James Willis, SciNet

Video link

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We are reaching the end of Moore's Law, the number of cores per chip is increasing and clock rates are peaking. Applications must be parallelised in order to reach peak theoretical performance of modern hardware. Alongside larger core counts, CPU vector registers have also increased in size. The latest chips support 512-bit vector registers operating with AVX512 instructions, which can give up to a 16x speed-up. In this talk we will introduce the concept of SIMD vectorisation and go through a simple example. We will also look at some optimisation techniques to improve vectorisation efficiency. Finally we will go over a few analysis tools that help identify potential code optimisations.

The Compute Ontario Colloquia are weekly Zoom presentations on Advanced Research Computing, High Performance Computing, Research Data Management, and Research Software topics, delivered by staff from three Compute Ontario consortia (CAC, SciNet, SHARCNET) and guest speakers. The series began January 2023 and superseded similar series previously delivered by individual consortia (e.g. General Interest Seminars by SHARCNET or User Group Meeting TechTalks by SciNet). The colloquia are one hour long and include time for questions. No registration is required. Presentations are usually recorded and uploaded to the hosting consortium video channel.