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From: mhx@iae.nl (mhx)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Parallel Forth on a 44 core machine
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2024 15:34:31 +0000
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My refurbished HP Z840 (from 2016) is finally running iForth.

Initially, the HP had a problem with its fan control and was
unbearably loud. I fixed that by replacing a failed transistor
that was being used as a temperature sensor. It's incredible how
large, knowledgeable, and helpful the HP community is, and how
well engineered and documented the Z series workstation are.

The Z840 is prepared for Linux and Windows 10. Because it came
with Windows pre-installed, I tried that first.

Installing iForth was the easy part, some of the other tools
(WSL2, Octave, MATLAB, VS) took quite a bit longer.

Although the Z840 is equipped with modern 1TB Samsung SSDs, these
are connected to the SATA interface and run at a maximum speed of
only 500MB/sec (instead of the 12GB/s we are now used to). I was
afraid that would become a bottleneck, but for now it will do.

Below the results for the first experiments with iSPICE (a SPICE
compatible circuit simulator that is written in iForth and supports
explicit parallel processing). I gave it a circuit of an SMPS with
44 component variations. Depending on the number of allotted cores,
iSPICE distributes the 44 jobs over the available processors and
stores the results in text and graphical formats. As can be seen
below, with 44 processors the tasks finish 22x faster than
with a single core. The CPU temperatures stay below 62 deg C.

The maximum RAM use is 64GB (this machine has 128GB).

Disk I/O is clearly a problem to be worked on, for now I
fake it by spacing the benchmark runs 30 seconds apart.

Scaling with the number of processors appears to be linear
and quite a bit better than it is on my AMD Ryzen 5800X,
although well below the theoretical factor of 44x.

iSPICE> .TICKER-INFO
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20GHz
  TICKS-GET uses os time & PROCESSOR-CLOCK 3000MHz
  Do: < n TO PROCESSOR-CLOCK RECALIBRATE >
 ok
iSPICE> BENCHTEST
Starting 1 process to run 44 jobs.
Master task (0) ready, waiting for the workers, performing FIX-UP ...
Job `2input-boost/2input-boost.cir` finished in 52.627 seconds.
waiting 30 seconds for flush to disk . . .

Starting 11 processes to run 44 jobs.
Master task (0) ready, waiting for the workers, performing FIX-UP ...
Job `2input-boost/2input-boost.cir` finished in 6.130 seconds.
waiting 30 seconds for flush to disk . . .

Starting 22 processes to run 44 jobs.
Master task (0) ready, waiting for the workers, performing FIX-UP ...
Job `2input-boost/2input-boost.cir` finished in 3.255 seconds.
waiting 30 seconds for flush to disk . . .

Starting 44 processes to run 44 jobs.
Master task (0) ready, waiting for the workers, performing FIX-UP ...
Job `2input-boost/2input-boost.cir` finished in 2.30 seconds.
waiting 30 seconds for flush to disk . . .

% cpus time [s]                             performance ratio
   1   52.921                               1
  11   6.521                                8.115473
  22   3.668                                14.427753
  44   2.431                                21.76923   ok

-marcel