[Gate-users] Performances: vGate vs Gate on macOS

[maxime]

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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