Excellent stuff, as always, Dan. Now, if only I could find a z15 on
which to play :-)
Ray
On 12/14/2021 12:03 AM, Dan Greiner wrote:
Back in late September, I posted a series of PowerPoint slides describing the
IBM z/Architecture vector facilities on my Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13OhBkhgbU7N6a20nVo5uEAnR-s3-Pyz8/view?usp=sharing
The most common response I've received is something to the effect of "good stuff ...
now what do I do with it?"
Last Christmas, I received a really annoying puzzle as a gift ... annoying
because solving it involved a lot of repetitive stress on my already inflamed
carpals. A simple C program did the trick, but I wanted to see if I could use
the vector ops to do better, so I started researching them. This led to a
months-long documentation project resulting in the slides mentioned above.
I've put together another short presentation — only 11 slides — that describe
the puzzle and one solution using vector instructions. There are numerous
features of the vector architecture, but this pitch illustrates what I think
are a few key points: SIMD, branch avoidance, and a really neat instruction
(VPERM). Unlike my previous stuff, there is no animation in these slides; the
meat of it is in the presenter notes, so make sure you view the notes page.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gD089nRo8Lch-rkg7T7pbwclBAvsp0bf/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104012833061983447284&rtpof=true&sd=true
Enjoy!
