Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Need to know how big the caches are on your processor? You could wade through the copious documentation on Intel or AMD’s web sites. It turns out this is no fun at all. I did this last week and still didn’t have the answer after skimming several white papers. ...
Tags: Parallel Computing, Performance
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Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
In part 1 and part 2 of my thread on C# optimization there was a lot of talk about algorithms and the like. The next two posts take a different tack… first re-implementing the same algorithm using different languages and then in a different language and hardware. It turns out ...
Tags: C#, Coding, Concurrency, NBody.net, Parallel Computing, Performance
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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Someone asked for a list of resources on N-Body modeling. I had a bunch of links in my favorites so here they are. I also threw in some more on technical computing and writing high performance code.
Tags: Concurrency, NBody.net, Parallel Computing, Performance, Technical computing
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Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
In Part 1 of Optimization Revisited I considered, with the help of Bill Clinton, improving performance by using a fundamentally better algorithm rather than micro-optimizing an existing one. One thing that’s pretty obvious looking at the CPU usage on a machine with more than one core is that even the ...
Tags: Concurrency, NBody.net, Parallel Computing, Performance
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Thursday, March 19th, 2009
As part of my journey in technical computing I’ve been writing a gravitational N-body simulation. Turns out you learn a thing or two about optimization when building numerical simulations that need to run as fast as possible. First off I used Vance Morrison’s code timer library to run multiple ...
Tags: Performance
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Sunday, September 14th, 2008
Which uses more power, the AeroCool Green Home Server or a 40 Watt light bulb? You guessed it, the light bulb looses.
A few hours playing with a Smart-Watt meter hooked up to my home server I came up with some power usage numbers. While idle the Home Server consumes less ...
Tags: Green IT, Hardware, Performance, Windows Home Server
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Thursday, September 11th, 2008
So having successfully put together a home server my mind started to wonder to desktop super computing and gravitational modeling. Which is when I came across this... Building home linux render cluster "24 cores that run each at 2.4 Ghz, a total of 48GB ram, and just need 400W ...
Tags: Hardware, High Performance Computing, Performance, Windows Home Server
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Friday, September 5th, 2008
So now the hardware all seems to be working it's time to install Windows Home Server and any associated add-ins. More importantly there are some drivers, BIOS and operating system settings to update in order to get the best performance from your system and reduce it's power consumption. The ...
Tags: Green IT, Hardware, Performance, Windows Home Server
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
I happened to come across the following code the other day. string cost = "FR" + "E" + "E"; // bad perf = true J
Which, after my performance investigation the other day, got me wondering again. Is there performance really going to be ...
Tags: C#, Coding, Performance
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Last night I was playing around with a vector class that's part of a scientific computation code I've been working on. It's a long story more on that later but it means I've found some of my own time to write code in. Anyway... The Vector class uses the automatically ...
Tags: C#, Coding, Performance
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Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more. If you're looking for alpine climbing you'll find it on my 
