

Web Search Using Small Cores: A paper on Microsoft Bing Architecture - yarapavan
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/27/WebSearchUsingSmallCores.aspx

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jbert
Interesting stuff. Does anyone know easy way to see the instructions-per-cycle
on a running (linux) server?

Or is it necessary to instrument each application with hires timers and count
instructions between the timer points?

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Freaky
I don't know about Linux, but on FreeBSD you can use pmcstat to instrument a
running process; see pmc(3) and pmcstat(8).

Linux probably has something similar.

    
    
        kldload: can't load hwpmc: Exec format error
    

Meh, need a custom kernel from the look of it, HWPMC_HOOKS isn't in GENERIC :(

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jbert
Thanks for the pointers.

Looks like the linux/ubuntu equivalent may be 'pfmon', also not enabled in the
stock kernel.

I think this is the relevant project page:
<http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/man/pfm_get_cycle_event.html>

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gcb
it's a paper on using Atom cores instead of more beefy ones.

The researchers just choose to use Bing for their test data instead of mysql
or something else... and their point was that bing was more cpu intensive, so
the results would be more solid.

