I use julia for my research. My lab has both iMac (i5@2.7GHz,8GB,High Seirra) and Hp Desktop machine (i7@3.6GHz,16GB, with elementaryOS). I ran a speed test using peakflops() in both the machines and the results are below
# For Linux desktop
julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 0.6.2
Commit d386e40c17 (2017-12-13 18:08 UTC)
Platform Info:
OS: Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
WORD_SIZE: 64
BLAS: libopenblas (USE64BITINT DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY Prescott)
LAPACK: libopenblas64_
LIBM: libopenlibm
LLVM: libLLVM-3.9.1 (ORCJIT, broadwell)
julia> peakflops()
3.588384754696235e10
julia> peakflops()
3.393129118818704e10
julia> peakflops(parallel=true)
3.667023267872277e10
julia> peakflops(parallel=true)
3.668789077963552e10
Besides that, it almost has to be the case that peakflops() just calls some POSIX binding or something, doesn’t it? If that’s indeed the case than the return value doesn’t have anything to do with Julia in particular.
You are testing on two different computers, so it is not surprising that one may be more performant than another. Also, specs tell you little about the real life experience.
"""
peakflops(n::Integer=2000; parallel::Bool=false)
`peakflops` computes the peak flop rate of the computer by using double precision
[`gemm!`](@ref LinearAlgebra.BLAS.gemm!). By default, if no arguments are specified, it
multiplies a matrix of size `n x n`, where `n = 2000`. If the underlying BLAS is using
multiple threads, higher flop rates are realized. The number of BLAS threads can be set with
[`BLAS.set_num_threads(n)`](@ref).
If the keyword argument `parallel` is set to `true`, `peakflops` is run in parallel on all
the worker processors. The flop rate of the entire parallel computer is returned. When
running in parallel, only 1 BLAS thread is used. The argument `n` still refers to the size
of the problem that is solved on each processor.
"""
A bit off topic:
I’ve been seeing this word “performant” a bit recently. What is it intended to mean?
Is it different to “one may be faster than another” ? or “one may be more efficient than another”?
Adjective. performant (comparative more performant, superlative most performant) (jargon, chiefly computing) Capable of or characterized by an adequate or excellent level of performance or efficiency.
Interesting, thank’s for indulging my off-topic side track.
Is there some context where saying “more performant” is clearer than saying “more efficient” or “faster”? … or in the context above just “one may perform better than another”?
I sound like I remember my grandmother sounding when she used to pick on my grammar, I must be getting old
Sometimes it’s important to learn the new technical jargon. Sometimes the new technical jargon is only there to make things seem more magical and complex than they really are.
Well, not that I can think of, and I’ve kind of caught the habit of using the term myself over the last few years!
On second thought, one could say that something is more performant, if it uses fewer resources, to get the same result in a similar time, I think, and “faster” would not do, in that case - so maybe more of a combination of faster and/or efficient, maybe implying better scalability.
I can’t think of an aspect of performance that people are referring to other than speed of execution. Allocations? Heat? DB access? Qubit flip rate? I don’t think they are being that precise. I expect it’s a plot to make old programmers look uneducated and out of touch.
I can’t imagine any non-speed parameter that wouldn’t be covered by “efficient” (the relationship between the consumed things you care about and the produced things you care about).
Haha, being one of those old programmers myself!
I think the real reason is simply the penchant in English for shortening things as much as possible,
“isn’t performant” is shorter/faster (more performant? ) than saying “doesn’t perform very well”, and
“is performant” than “performs adequately”.
This probably means that OpenBLAS does not correctly identify your new processor, so it is not using the best SIMD instructions. (Prescott is the fallback architecture.)
You could build Julia to use MKL for BLAS, or you can try to force OpenBLAS to use the Haswell target. (See the README at the main Julia repo for instructions.)
I tried to install Julia Pro. My desktop is running elementaryOS. For those who are new to elementaryOS, it is derived from ubuntu and anything working in ubuntu should work in elementaryOS also. But I’m getting this error when trying to install:
vish@eliteone:~/Downloads$ ./JuliaPro-0.6.2.2_mkl_build-17.sh /opt/julialang/pro/
JuliaPro installation has started, please wait until all the files are extracted
OS Detected: elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki
Unsupported Linux Distribution: elementary
The OpenBLAS shipped with binary Julia distributions has a “dynamic” target which means that it picks an instruction set based on a runtime CPU check. Unfortunately the OpenBLAS team had not yet added checks for the newest models when the version used for Julia distribution was packaged. (I don’t know if this is corrected for your model in newer OpenBLAS.)
