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Unit 4.3.3 Jeff Diamond, Oracle

How slow can it go? Detuning BLIS for fun and profit

Some thoughts for discussion

One of the core research tenants of BLIS was to reduce the amount of assembly code in the design, giving up a small amount of performance in exchange for an exponential jump in maintainability, agility, portability, generality and flexibility. As a result, BLIS can now adapt to new hardware almost immediately and continues to expand its official orthogonal feature set and its unofficial uses beyond dense linear algebra. At Oracle, we are searching for the next lower tier - is there a sweet spot where we could give up a little more performance in BLIS for even greater wins in terms of portability, flexibility, and agility? We will be sharing our preliminary results and would like to hear feedback as well as your own experiences with high performance programming. This talk will also touch on issues relevant to the panel discussion.

"In conclusion" slide (click to enlarge)