I am a bit confused:
1.
You were able to run multiple instances of AB all using same
database on one machine? I thought that is not possible.
2.
25% CPU utilization on a quad core CPU means 1 core is fully
occupied etc. i.e. on my dual core AMD CPU AB never consumes more than 50%. If utilization
is stuck at 50% the machine grinds to a halt.
3.
If the application itself cannot utilize multiple cores (I believe
few exist now), the maximum “utilization” you could get from a quad
core CPU should be 25% of the theoretical total computing power. Am I missing
something?
Joseph Biran
____________________________________________
From:
amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve
Dugas
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 5:50 PM
To: Yahoo - AmiBroker
Subject: [amibroker] Quad-core test results
I
finished setting up the new quad-core machine and ran my first tests today,
so am posting the promised test results. All I can say is Wow!
Really nice improvements, even better than I expected to
see in my highest hopes. I am happy as a pig in sh*t
!! 8 - )
For
background, the test was an optimization run on a single ticker,
which is how I will be running all my other tests ( ticker was
QID, 468 EOD data bars ). All tests used the same code with different
param settings, all tests had about 46,000 opt steps.
To
put things in perspective and show why I am so happy, the original code was
about 2,400 lines. The first time I ran it, on my old backup computer which
I was using as a dedicated optimization machine, it took 7 1/2 hours to run.
So then I copied the code and created a shorter version, removing everything
which wasn't absolutley necessary for the optimizer, and that reduced
the run time to 2 1/2 hours. Then I ran this short version on
my faster primary machine and that took 1 1/4 hours, which is about what I
was expecting to see on the new machine.
So today
I started by running just ran one instance on the quad-core
- that took only 30 mins and Task Manager showed it
was using just 25% of the total processing power! Well to make
a long story short, I kept adding one instance at a time, all
instances ran in 30 mins and each used up an additional 25% of
the CPU power. In the end, I was easily running 4 simultaneous
instances. This pretty much kept the CPU tached at 100% but all instances ran
fine, all finished in 30 mins and I didn't experience any
problems at all. I was even saving the first ones to spreadsheets while the
final ones were still finishing, wow everything just worked flawlessly!
So, the quad-core can run 4 seperate opts simultaneously in 30 mins,
which averages out to 7 1/2 minutes per opt, which =
10X
improvement over running the short code on the fast machine...
20X
improvement over running the short code on the old dedicated optimization
machine...
60X
improvement over running the original code on the old optimization
machine... Awesome !!!
To
those who were wondering what is the best machine to get for running
AB, it looks to me like quad is the way to go. ( My machine has an
Intel processor, which TJ mentioned should probably work better than AMD for
this stuff )....