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<div class="moz-text-html" lang="x-unicode"> Hi yt-dev,<br>
<br>
I am developing a frontend for Einstein Toolkit for yt and in the
process I generated some crude, preliminary benchmarks which I
thought I would share in case anybody is interested.<br>
<br>
I performed three tests:<br>
<ol>
<li>I just load the dataset and calculate (say) the maximum of
some quantity on each grid.<br>
</li>
<li>I load in the dataset and calculate the maximum of the
magnitude of a gradient on each grid. This requires the
generation of ghost zones at grid boundaries. <br>
</li>
<li>I load in the dataset and perform a volume rendering. I make
a "movie" with 4 frames where I rotate around the volume.</li>
</ol>
<p>Salient details:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>I performed these tests with the attached scripts. I turned
openmp and MPI off (set OMP_NUM_THREADS=1). <br>
</li>
<li>The domain sizes were: 64^3, 128^3, 256^3, and 512^3. <br>
</li>
<li>All four datasets have only one refinement level. However
the 512^3 dataset has multiple grids on that refinement level.</li>
<li>The size of a dataset ranges from about 10MB for the 64^3
set to 10GB for the 512^3</li>
<li>All data was performed on a single modern workstation.
Details: 2.6GHz clock with AVX2 instructions and a 60MB L3
cache.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Results:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Reading in the data is (for the datasets I tested) extremely
fast. The 512^3 dataset takes only about 20 seconds to read
the whole thing in.</li>
<li>Generating the first frame in a volume render is extremely
slow. On the order of 4 minutes for the 512^3 data set. After
the first frame is produced, new frames are fast, even with
openmp off. With 1 openmp thread, it takes on the order of 10s
of seconds for a new frame.<br>
</li>
<li>Generating ghost zones is very fast for datasets with only
one grid. It is incredibly slow for datasets with multiple
grids, dominating the run time.</li>
<li>I attach a plot comparing the three tests.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Naively, it seems to me that there must be several sources of
overhead when I perform volume rendering that are significantly
more costly than simply reading in the data (which seems to be
fast). Clearly one of these is the generation of the ghost
zones, and another is the actual ray tracing (although the ray
tracing itself seems to be quite fast.). However I'm not sure
that these two operations alone explain the cost of the volume
rendering.<br>
</p>
<p>I'd love to know other people's experience with benchmarking.
Do these costs seem normal, up to an order of magnitude or so?
Would you have any insight into what contributes to the cost of
generating the first frame when volume rendering?<br>
</p>
<p>Thanks very much!<br>
</p>
<p>Best,<br>
Jonah Miller<br>
</p>
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