How To Get Performance From Commodity Processors?

• Today’s processors can achieve high-performance, but this requires extensive machine-specific hand tuning.

• Routines have a large design space w/many parameters

  • Blocking sizes, loop nesting permutations, loop unrolling depths, software pipelining strategies, register allocations, and instruction schedules.
  • Complicated interactions with the increasingly sophisticated microarchitectures of new microprocessors.

• A few months ago no tuned BLAS for Pentium for Linux.

• Need for quick/dynamic deployment of optimized routines.

• ATLAS - Automatic Tuned Linear Algebra Software

  • PhiPac from Berkeley
  • FFTW from MIT

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