Tuning packages for a CPU micro-architecture

Ludovic Courtès — January 6, 2022

It should come as no surprise that the execution speed of programs is a primary concern in high-performance computing (HPC). Many HPC practitioners would tell you that, among their top concerns, is the performance of high-speed networks used by the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and use of the latest vectorization extensions of modern CPUs.

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Optimized and portable Open MPI packaging

Ludovic Courtès — December 19, 2019

High-performance networks have constantly been evolving, in sometimes hard-to-decipher ways. Once upon a time, hardware vendors would pre-install an MPI implementation (often an in-house fork of one of the free MPI implementations) specially tailored for their hardware. Fortunately, this time appears to be gone. Despite that, there is still widespread belief that MPI cannot be packaged in a way that achieves best performance on a variety of contemporary high-speed networking hardware.

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Pre-built binaries vs. performance

Ludovic Courtès — January 31, 2018

Guix follows a transparent source/binary deployment model: it will download pre-built binaries when they’re available—like apt-get or yum—and otherwise falls back to building from source. Most of the time the project’s build farm provides binaries so that users don’t have to spend resources building from source. Pre-built binaries may be missing when you’re installing a custom package, or when the build farm hasn’t caught up yet. However, deployment of binaries is often seen as incompatible with high-performance requirements—binaries are “generic”, so how can they take advantage of cutting-edge HPC hardware? In this post, we explore the issue and solutions.

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