Hi Kingsley, On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 11:43:46AM -0800, Kingsley G. Morse Jr. wrote: > My understanding is IBMs "POWER9" CPUs > > 1.) have SIMD instructions[1] and > > 2.) are used by the new, and very cool, open > *hardware* Talos II workstations[2], which > > 3.) already run Debian.
Debian's ISA baseline for ppc64el is Power8, so a Power9 branch of SIMDebian makes sense. Actually I already have (root) access to a Power9 VM, applied from IBM. And I agree that Power architecture is a wonderful candidate architecture for high performance computing, since one of my old tests suggested that Power8+OpenBLAS is basically as fast as E5-2687Wv4+MKL for 4096x4096 double precision matrix production[2]. The Power SIMD instruction set (VSX, or say altivec) was available since Power8 (IIRC), and many scientific software are already optimized with VSX. However Power machines are really too expensive so I don't expect a SIMDebian (Power9) community in reasonable size. So my main focus is on x86_64 architecture, which has the largest potential user community. That said, you are welcome to join the group[1] and help maintain the power9 branch :-) [1] https://github.com/SIMDebian/ [2] I think Power8/9 architecture benefits a lot from its enormous cache size at this point.
