First, we analyze the results for the small problem. We display the results as relative speeds normalized by the speed achieved on one CPU of the Power Challenge by the program using the public domain FFT library; that is, the slowest possible run. The relative speeds are computed from elapsed time measured on systems as empty as possible.
Figure 1 shows these relative speeds for all the computations performed to solve the small problem, excluded one-time initializations. The measured speed are plotted with solid lines, while the dashed lines correspond to the ideal parallel speed up for each program. As expected, the slowest runs were on the Power Challenge (lines labeled 1 and 2), that is also the oldest among the computers we tested.
The four-processor Xeon (line 6) is the fastest of all computers, running even faster than the O200 with native FFTs (line 4). The dual-processor Pentium III (line 5) runs slightly slower than the Xeon, likely because of the slower I/O. The parallel speed-up for all cases is reasonable, though for such small problem the serial I/Os handicap the parallel runs.
Figure 2 shows the relative speeds for the whole parallel portion of the code. A good parallel speed-up is achieved in all cases, indicating that when the problem fits in cache there is no degradation of performances caused by contentions between threads in accessing memory. The dual-processor Pentium III runs about 10% slower than the Xeon, and shows slightly worse parallel speed-up. Since the CPU run at the same speed, this difference can be attributed to the smaller and slower secondary cache.
Figure 3 shows the relative speeds for the FFTs, and has a similar interpretation as Figure 2. Notice, that this is the case for which the Xeon out-performs the Power Challenge the most, with the four processors running about fourteen times faster than one R8000. The Origin 200 and the dual-processor Pentium III scale the worse for the FFTs, probably because of slower caches.
 |
 |
 |