Re: [amibroker] Quad-core test results, AmiBroker Email List Archive

I am a bit confused:

You were able to run multiple instances of AB all using same database on one machine? I thought that is not possible.

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.

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

Hi All,

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 )....

Steve