sam2y@koa.cs.Virginia.EDU (Steven A. Moyer) (05/22/91)
A number of people in various newsgroups have requested information concerning the performance of the i860 and/or i860 compilers. A study just completed at the University of Virginia examines in depth the processor-memory interrelationship for a board consisting of an i860 and memory subsystem constructed from page-mode DRAMs. >From an understanding of this interrelationship, guidelines are established for implementing inner-loop operations in a manner consistent with the processor architecture and memory system performance characteristics; by adhering to these guidelines the assembly language programmer or compiler writter can realize a 200-300% increase in performance over code generated in a "straight-forward" fashion. The implementation techniques presented throughout the report are dependent on a memory system constructed with static-column or page-mode DRAMs. In addition, the report focuses on vector operations (BLAS-like routines) and scientific computations built on top of them. To ftp a copy of this report for printing at your local site: 1) ftp uvacs.cs.virginia.edu (128.143.8.29) login as 'anonymous' 2) cd pub/techreports/ipc 3) * set ftp to BINARY mode 4) get ipc_91-007.PS.Z 5) exit out of ftp 6) uncompress ipc_91-007.PS.Z 7) lpr ipc_91-007.PS The report is formated for double-sided pages. Simply remove the first 2 cover pages and drop the rest in a copier set for 1-sided to 2-sided copy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * For those not having access to a Unix system or who are without the luxury of a postscript printer, hardcopies can be had by request. To receive a hardcopy of this report, send a request to: Institute for Parallel Computation School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 OR bhl7u@virginia.edu ask for IPC-TR-91-007 "Performance of the iPSC/860 Node Architecture" PLEASE STATE IN YOUR REQUEST THAT YOU ARE WITHOUT THE NECESSARY FACILITIES TO FTP AND/OR PRINT A COPY OF THIS REPORT. -- +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Steve Moyer | THIS SPACE FOR RENT | | University of Virginia | | | | "Just a rebel without a clue..." | | E-mail: sam2y@virginia.edu | - The Replacements | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+