[Gate-users] Micro-architecture compiler flags in GATE

[Bryan McIntosh]

Dear Maxime and Antoine,

A few weeks ago, I saw on the GATE mailing list that Maxime has used the
GCC flag -march=skylake-avx515 to increase performance on newer Intel CPUs
that support hardware-accelerated AVX-512 instructions. After a bit of
research I found that similar flags exist for taking advantage of AVX and
AVX2 acceleration on AMD Ryzen CPUs (znver1 and znver2, depending on the
CPU), and I am interested to see if these lead to a performance increase as
well.

One problem that I have, though, is I am not sure where to place these
flags during the compilation process. Do they go in CMakeLists.txt, or
somewhere else? And if the former, where in the file do they need to go?

Thank you very much for your time,

-Bryan McIntosh

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 5:21 AM <
gate-users-request at lists.opengatecollaboration.org> wrote:

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>    1. Re: Performances: vGate vs Gate on macOS (maxime)
>
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2020 11:04:25 +0100
> From: maxime <maxime.chauvin at inserm.fr>
> To: Antoine Merlet <ant.merlet at gmail.com>
> Cc: gate-users at lists.opengatecollaboration.org
> Subject: Re: [Gate-users] Performances: vGate vs Gate on macOS
> Message-ID: <1B5C3CB4-EDE1-44A6-96D4-3E1E4A29F1F4 at inserm.fr>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear Antoine,
>
> yes this is expected. I have seen the same on my macbook, GATE being
> slightly faster in the vGATE compared to the host (MacOS) with the standard
> compiling options.
>
> Virtual machines are quite good at using the full CPU power, it is a
> different story for GPU…
>
> So in the end, the only thing that matters (VM or not) is the clock speed
> of your CPU. You can slightly increase the performance with compiler
> options related to your CPU architecture.
>
> For example, we have seen an increase of performance of ~20% on an HPC (
> https://www.calmip.univ-toulouse.fr/ <https://www.calmip.univ-toulouse.fr/>)
> with the compiler option "-march=skylake-avx512” for Intel Skylake
> processors. For this you need to compile both Geant4 and GATE with the
> compiler optimisation option.
>
> Of course we are talking about performance on a single CPU. You can speed
> up your simulation by running several sub-simulations on many CPUs.
>
> Best regards,
>   Maxime Chauvin
>
> > On 10 Jan 2020, at 10:38, Antoine Merlet <ant.merlet at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear Gate users,
> >
> > I have compiled the latest develop version of Gate with Geant4-10.05.p01
> under macOS Mojave. Previously using vGate on the same MacBook, I was
> hoping for decreased simulation time after removing the virtual machine
> intermediary. However, tests shows nearly no differences - vGate is even a
> bit faster - regardless of the simulation duration (minutes / dozens of
> hours).
> >
> > Therefore, I would like to know if anyone had similar experiences, and
> if this kind of results are to be expected. Also, is there any way of
> increasing the performances of Gate on macOS by optimizing the compilation
> parameters?
> >
> > You can find enclosed a simple test file which has been adapted from
> GateContrib Cylindrical PET example (
> https://github.com/OpenGATE/GateContrib/tree/master/imaging/PET <
> https://github.com/OpenGATE/GateContrib/tree/master/imaging/PET>). The
> resulting simulation time is 8min44s when using vGate and 8min50sec when
> using Gate under macOS.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Antoine
> >
> <main.mac><GateMaterials.db>_______________________________________________
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