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

Tue Feb 4 10:50:16 CET 2020

Dear Bryan,

According to the comment you mentioned, I personally I used -march=native
for my MacBook, which brought a 3% speed increase only. I did so by adding
this flag in the following CMake entries (they can be found in advanced
mode using ccmake): CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELEASE and CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE. A
ccording to your build type, you might want to use in it in DEBUG or other
(instead of RELEASE).

Best regards,
Antoine

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 4:27 PM Bryan McIntosh <mcintoshster at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> 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
>> >
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