FFT

This paper presents the results of a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) benchmark of the FFTW 3.3 library on Colfax’s 4-CPU, large memory servers. Unlike other published benchmarks of this library, we study two distinct cases of FFT usage: sequential and concurrent computation of multithreaded transforms. In addition, this paper provides results for very large (up to N = 231) and massively parallel (up to 80 threads) shared memory transforms, which have not yet been reported elsewhere. The FFT calculation is discussed: parallelization techniques and hardware-specific implementations; motivation for a specific astrophysical research is given. Results presented here include: dependence of performance on the transform size and on the number of threads, memory usage of multithreaded 1D FFTs, estimates of the FFT planning time. The paper shows how to optimize the performance of concurrent independent calculations on these large memory systems by setting an efficient NUMA policy. This policy partitions the machine’s resources, reducing the average memory latency. Such optimization [...]