Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
Mel Gorman, another of the skynet members speaking at SkyCon, brought us through an example of a large matrix multiplication and the implications of optimising this using libhugetlbfs library and HugePage support in the Linux kernel. Huge pages are pinned in RAM, and generally must be allocated at boot time, since it's unlikely that the memory will be available.
Using opcontrol as a profiling tool, Mel demonstrated that on various systems around his office, performance increases of between 10% and 300% could be achieved simply by changing from using 4K pagetable blocks to HugePages.
The discussion of which hardware platform has the best MMU has been postponed until later in the pub :-)
