Hi Greg,

> (what's "RT" there, anyway?)

Runtime, 'CHPL_RT_' is the prefix we use for the other runtime specific
environment variables (CHPL_RT_NUM_THREADS_PER_LOCALE, ...)

> So one could consider CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM something like a noun and
>CHPL_RT_ARCH something like an adjective?

They are actually a bit more orthogonal than that. CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM is
more along the lines of what operating system you are using, while
CHPL_RT_ARCH would be what processor you have in that machine.

> Whatever we do needs to pay attention to CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER...

This is very true, each compiler will need it's own tweaks and attention.
If I was reading an email from last week correctly, I think that for at
least PrgEnv-cray we wouldn't set anything.

Thanks,

-Kyle


On 4/30/14, 3:47 PM, "Greg Titus" <[email protected]> wrote:

>Hi Kyle --
>
>Just some quick thoughts ...
>
>We already have CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM.  Is CHPL_RT_ARCH (what's "RT"
>there, anyway?) intended as an adjunct to that?  So one could consider
>CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM something like a noun and CHPL_RT_ARCH something
>like an adjective?
>
>Whatever we do needs to pay attention to CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER.  If we
>have CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER=cray-prgenv-*, for example, we need to limit
>what things people can do with an environment variable, because if we
>don't we can find ourselves in conflict with the other PrgEnv* module
>settings that have to do with ISA, etc.
>
>greg
>
>
>On Wed, 30 Apr 2014, Kyle Brady wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> While I was working on the BitOps library, I noticed that using compiler
>> intrinsics wasn't actually giving a performance increase. In fact, some
>> compiler's intrinsics would actually perform worse than my versions of
>>the
>> operations that were plain C. The problem boils down to that unless you
>> tell the compiler to optimize for a specific architecture or instruction
>> set it assumes that those instructions are not available for use.
>>
>> The easy way to tell the compiler (gcc/clang/intel) about these featuers
>> is by setting '-march=native' when compiling [0]. This tells the
>>compiler
>> to detect and use any features available in the host processor, but it
>> creates a non-portable binary. The problem with that is we cross-compile
>> often.  Beyond 'native' there are a large number of processor
>> architectures available for -march. There are also flags to enable
>>support
>> for a specific instruction sets in the form of the -msse, -msse2, -mavx
>> and several others.
>>
>>
>> So we need some way to specify the minimum feature set for compilation.
>>To
>> complicate things further, we'd like to use these settings while
>>compiling
>> the runtime. In addition, even though -march=native is shared across
>> intel, clang, and gcc, for anything other than 'native' intel uses
>> different values than clang/gcc. The values gcc uses vary from version
>>to
>> version as well.
>>
>> All of this together means that we probably have to add an user
>> configurable setting along the lines of 'CHPL_RT_ARCH' and/or
>> 'CHPL_RT_INSTRUCTION_SETS' and provide no default value. An alternative
>> would be to use -march=native when nothing has been given, unless we are
>> in a known cross-compilation setting (PrgEnv-*).
>>
>> So that is the gist of it. Does anyone have thoughts or preferences on
>> this?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -Kyle
>>
>> [0] For a good overview on these settings see:
>>    https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GCC_optimization#The_basics
>>
>>
>> 
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