(See the prelude for some general information on what this is all about)
You’re not the average computer or domain scientist, who has to buy off-the-shelf white-box hardware and run GCC-compiled code on it. You deserve something better, shinier, fancier, which, incidentally, makes your code run faster. And even without special hardware there are those neat little dirty tricks you only get to know when diving deep into the hardware-software interactions. In a sense, it’s the complement of slowing down the baseline (see stunt 2 and stunt 9). The only thing you need to care about is make sure nobody notices. Here’s what can give you a decisive edge:
Figure 1: Liquid nitrogen cooling is overclocker’s heaven! (Image by Rico Shen)
Pimped-up hardware: Overclocked, nitrogen-cooled (see Fig. 1), high-bin hardware that takes its own power plant to run is a rewarding platform. Since you do not care about reproducibility of results, the fact that nobody else has access to your hardware shouldn’t give you sleepless nights.
No safety nets: ECC protection and short memory refresh cycles are for cowards! Bleeding-edge research has no use for pathetic whiners who prefer reliability over performance.
Quiet machine: Ask your friendly system administrators to stop the queues for everybody else and let you have the whole machine for your own benchmarking. That will lift the burden of statistical analysis off your shoulders.
Eliminate inconvenient details: Away with that bloody routine which takes only 10% of serial runtime but is so awfully hard to optimize. Who needs boundary handling anyway?
Low-level programming: “A=B+C” is lame. “vaddpd (%r13,%r8,8), %ymm1, %ymm2” rocks your world. You think assembly, you breathe machine code, and you use C intrinsics only on bad hair day. Keep your secrets and let the losers deal with the deficiencies of their rotten GNU compilers!
This stunt is a combination of #3, #10 and #11 from Bailey’s original collection.