This Wednesday we presented at the Downtown NYC Tech Meetup which focused on how hardware still matters. During the presentation, we’ve shown off Concertio Optimizer for the first time and it felt great! You can see the video here:
How dynamic tuning can outperform manual tuning
We focused on a knob that toggles CPU cache prefetching and an example benchmark that had two phases: one that runs faster with the prefetchers, and one that runs faster without the prefetchers. During the demo on a Packet type-1 server, the benchmark took 55 seconds to complete with the prefetchers and 57 seconds without the prefetchers. We then tried running Optimizer in the background, and after 5 minutes of training, the runtime dropped to around 52 seconds. Optimizer correctly identified the two phases and applied the best setting for each phase. This demo showed how dynamic tuning can achieve better results than manual tuning.
Tuning Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro cards
With the help of Mellanox we’ve demonstrated how Concertio Optimizer tunes a networking knob (tx-usecs) on Packet typ2-2 servers with Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro network cards. We ran two benchmarks. The first ran 60% faster when tx-usecs is set to 512usecs instead of the default 16usecs. The second ran 3.3x slower when tx-usecs changes from the default 16usecs to 512usecs. DatArcs Optimizer correctly identified which setting performed better for each application, and set tx-usecs to the appropriate value in each case.
Other results
We’ve also presented some exciting results for Phoronix Apache Web Server benchmark and Cloudsuite in-memory analytics benchmark. We’ll share these results in another post next week when we publish the download links for beta version 0.3. Stay tuned!
