Discussing SIMD Images for Intel Servers Stability and Performance

TLDR The authors discussed the simd images by Prabhat for the on-prem intel servers by Chris. Chris conducted some tests with some issues. Prabhat suggested benefits are expected in aggregation queries.

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Chris
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:45:46 UTC

our on-prem intel servers all support simd/avx512.... is that going to be released as a binary linux-amd64 release? and do you have any indicative figures of how much is gained during which operations?

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Prabhat
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:26:29 UTC

You can download the simd images from

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Prabhat
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:27:09 UTC

We have not done a comparative performance benchmarking of simd vs basic yet.

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Chris
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:30:43 UTC

ah, good, will give that a try when i get a chance.... is the simd version regarded as stable?

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Prabhat
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:55:45 UTC

Yes, we use it a lot.

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Chris
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 14:57:20 UTC

i pulled the amd64-simd-0.5.0 image, extracted the executable, and ran that on our test standalone instance (non-containerised).... it worked fine, but... repeatedly running a query over 56M records scansize 147098MB reported 700-800ms for the non-simd exec and 800-900ms for the simd one... admittedly a very rough-and-ready test but i wasn't expecting to see it worsen.... have i missed anything obvious?

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Prabhat
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:46:18 UTC

How have been results on aggregations? Dashboards?

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Chris
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:49:15 UTC

i haven't tried much else.... that's why i was curious as to which functions you think it would benefit and which it probably wouldn't.... assume there is no config or other packages etc necessary - just the binary?

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Prabhat
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:49:57 UTC

It should be just the binary. There is no benefit expected in search. However we expect big benefits in aggregation queries.

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Chris
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:50:50 UTC

ok.... will bear that in mind and do some more tests when i get time (end of the day here now)

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Prabhat
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:51:48 UTC

What is configuration of the machine on which you tested this?

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Chris
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:52:46 UTC

sorry, people waiting for me... will send you details next week

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Prabhat
Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:52:57 UTC

no worries. TTYL