Tunç Bahçecioğlu » visual studio

VS2010 good (sort of), vs2005 bad

tunc — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:43:06 +0000

I multiplied two 1000×1000 float matrices using the Eigen library on VS2005 and VS2010 with different optimizations, here are the results:

	VS2005 (s)	VS2010 ()
none	2.873	2.812
OpenMP	1.759	1.671
SSE	3.258	2.911
SSE2	5.057	0.224
OpenMP + SSE	1.807	1.598
OPENMP + SSE2	2.774	0.134

SO,

OpenMP support of Eigen works well.
Shouldn’t SSE work for floats ???
VS2005 is horrible with vectorization optimizations.
OPENMP + SSE2 + VS2010 with Eigen kicks ass!!!

MPI Debugging with Visual Studio

tunc — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:16:40 +0000

Quick article about debugging your parallel applications with Visual Studio

Open your project properties, and go to Configuration Properties->Debugging

All we have to do is to fill 3 textboxes:

MPIRun Command is the path + filename of your mpirun applcation(usually mpiexec.exe or mpirun.exe), In my case it is "c:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin\mpiexec.exe" (do not forget the “”).
MPIRun Arguments are the arguments we want to pass to the mPIRun command, at very least we have to tell mpi the number processes to spawn, so we use –n 2 for 2 processes (change 2 as you wish).
MPIShim Loacation is the path + filename of your mpishim.exe file. Mpishim.exe is diffrent for every release of visual studio and platform you have. For example its location for Visual Studio 2005 for 32bit platforms should be “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86”

Installing boost for visual studio

tunc — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:06:01 +0000

Boost is a collection of free libraries for c++, kind of a Swiss knife for the c++ geek.
Most of boost is actually header only and don’t need any installation. To use the small dark part of boost
you need to install them, well built them, here is how:

Short, Softcore Method:

Go to BoostPro Computing and download a web installer. Follow the installer instructions.
It needs a free registration, and it does not contain some libraries like Boost.Python

Long, Hardcore Method:

This is the programmers way., we will built the libraries ourselves.

1.We start by downloading Boost Source code from Sourceforge

2.Extract the zip file to a nice folder, for me it is c:\Program Files\Boost\

3.Build BJam

Bjam is a tool that will help us built BOOST, but we first have to built it:
-Open visual studio Comman Prompt ,
start->All Programs->Microsoft Visual Studio 2005->visual studio tools->visual studio command prompt
cd C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_39_0\tools\jam\src>
built.bat
This made the following C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_39_0\tools\jam\src\bin.ntx86\bjam.exe
Now copy bjam.exe to the root boost directory : C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_39_0\

4.Build Boost

from the visual studio command promt go to C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_39_0\
For a complete set of libraries use the following:
bjam –toolset=msvc-8.0 –build-type=complete
If you want a sub set here are your options:
bjam toolset=msvc-8.0 variant=debug threading=multi link=shared
bjam toolset=msvc-8.0 variant=release threading=multi link=static
Now this will take some time…

5.Enjoy

Your lib directory is C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_39_0\stage\lib
Yout include directory is C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_39_0\include

For details of this process you can refer to Boost getting started web pages