Measure Twice, Cut Once

In a previous post, I observed that, as I increased the number of cores in my GPGPU, performance began to plateau and hardware threads spent more time stalled because their store queue was full. I speculated that the latter might cause the latter, although that wasn't definitive. The current implementation only has a single store queue entry for each thread. One optimization I've been considering is adding more store queue entries, but this has subtle and complex design tradeoffs.

Lost in Translation

I sometimes sympathize with Mike Mulligan, staring up from the bottom of his freshly dug basement at four neat walls and four neat corners and realizing he's forgotten to leave a way out. The advantage of construction in the virtual world is that it's easy to back up and start over. Sometimes my approach to a complex new feature is to implement until I run into a dead end, revert my changes, and think about it some more. It's not uncommon for me to make several runs at a feature, each time building a better mental model of the problem.