by Gaston Hillar
NUMA (short for “Non-Uniform Memory Access”) architectures are becoming popular in high-performance computing (HPC) scenarios. Therefore, it is very important to work with efficient and optimized memory allocators. QuickThread is a new commercial C++ multicore programming library loaded with many optimizations for NUMA architectures, bringing a new option to create high-performance parallelized code.
One of the most interesting features found in QuickThread is its design to take full advantage of the underlying hardware, considering all the cache levels (L1; L2 and L3) and the NUMA nodes. The developer can experience with different configurations in order to maximize the performance offered by certain algorithms running on very complex and heterogeneous hardware. QuickThread extends the concept of thread affinity to a new level. It offers developers more control than other libraries because it considers more low-level details of the underlying hardware. For example, it allows a developer to allocate data objects from a particular NUMA node.
