We're often asked whether - and by how much - the Advance Toolchain actually helps performance for applications running on the various distros (RHEL and SLES) on POWER systems.
The Advance Toolchain of course is a set of updated rpms which provide an updated gcc compiler, processor-tuned libraries, and a number of more current tools over what is standard in the distro itself. Check out one of the README files available for more details.
The ability to easily flip to a newer "toolchain" for POWER7 systems has been particularly helpful for many applications. An article was recently completed which demonstrates the relative performance gains when leveraging the latest Advance Toolchain (version 3.0-1) from the University of Illinois over the gcc which comes packaged with each distro release.
The article "Advance Toolchain performance improvements" provides the details and graphs of component-by-component breakdowns of engineering runs of SPECcpu2006® for integer and floating point workloads. The relative performance gains and losses are graphed which provides a quick view of the possibilities of using these libraries and newer gcc.
One of the key highlights is that the graphs very nicely demonstrate the repeating performance perspective of "Well, it depends...". Not all workloads will benefit from the libraries, but many do!
Indeed, a key advantage of the Advance Toolchain is the continuing focus, updates, optimizations, and fixes which provides users with the latest technologies in a form which can be serviced and supported by IBM.
SPEC® and the benchmark names SPECint® and SPECfp® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
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