How to get 100% CPU usage from a C program

Question

This is quite an interesting question so let me set the scene. I work at The National Museum of Computing, and we have just managed to get a Cray Y-MP EL super computer from 1992 running, and we really want to see how fast it can go!

We decided the best way to do this was to write a simple C program that would calculate prime numbers and show how long it took to do so, then run the program on a fast modern desktop PC and compare the results.

We quickly came up with this code to count prime numbers:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

void main() {
    clock_t start, end;
    double runTime;
    start = clock();
    int i, num = 1, primes = 0;

    while (num <= 1000) { 
        i = 2; 
        while (i <= num) { 
            if(num % i == 0)
                break;
            i++; 
        }
        if (i == num)
            primes++;

        system("clear");
        printf("%d prime numbers calculated\n",primes);
        num++;
    }

    end = clock();
    runTime = (end - start) / (double) CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
    printf("This machine calculated all %d prime numbers under 1000 in %g seconds\n", primes, runTime);
}

Which on our dual core laptop running Ubuntu (The Cray runs UNICOS), worked perfectly, getting 100% CPU usage and taking about 10 minutes or so. When I got home I decided to try it on my hex-core modern gaming PC, and this is where we get our first issues.

I first adapted the code to run on Windows since that is what the gaming PC was using, but was saddened to find that the process was only getting about 15% of the CPU's power. I figured that must be Windows being Windows, so I booted into a Live CD of Ubuntu thinking that Ubuntu would allow the process to run with its full potential as it had done earlier on my laptop.

However I only got 5% usage! So my question is, how can I adapt the program to run on my gaming machine in either Windows 7 or live Linux at 100% CPU utilisation? Another thing that would be great but not necessary is if the end product can be one .exe that could be easily distributed and ran on Windows machines.

Thanks a lot!

P.S. Of course this program didn't really work with the Crays 8 specialist processors, and that is a whole other issue... If you know anything about optimising code to work on 90's Cray super computers give us a shout too!

Answer 1

Also be very aware how you're loading the CPU. A CPU can do a lot of different tasks, and while many of them will be reported as "loading the CPU 100%" they may each use 100% of different parts of the CPU. In other words, it's very hard to compare two different CPUs for performance, and especially two different CPU architectures. Executing task A may favor one CPU over another, while executing task B it can easily be the other way around (since the two CPUs may have different resources internally and may execute code very differently).

This is the reason software is just as important for making computers perform optimal as hardware is. This is indeed very true for "supercomputers" as well.

One measure for CPU performance could be instructions per second, but then again instructions aren't created equal on different CPU architectures. Another measure could be cache IO performance, but cache infrastructure is not equal either. Then a measure could be number of instructions per watt used, as power delivery and dissipation is often a limiting factor when designing a cluster computer.

So your first question should be: Which performance parameter is important to you? What do you want to measure? If you want to see which machine gets the most FPS out of Quake 4, the answer is easy; your gaming rig will, as the Cray can't run that program at all ;-)

Cheers, Steen

Answer 2

You're running one process on a multi-core machine - so it only runs on one core.

The solution is easy enough, since you're just trying to peg the processor - if you have N cores, run your program N times (in parallel, of course).

Example

Here is some code that runs your program NUM_OF_CORES times in parallel. It's POSIXy code - it uses fork - so you should run that under Linux. If what I'm reading about the Cray is correct, it might be easier to port this code than the OpenMP code in the other answer.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>

#define NUM_OF_CORES 8
#define MAX_PRIME 100000

void do_primes()
{
    unsigned long i, num, primes = 0;
    for (num = 1; num <= MAX_PRIME; ++num) {
        for (i = 2; (i <= num) && (num % i != 0); ++i);
        if (i == num)
            ++primes;
    }
    printf("Calculated %d primes.\n", primes);
}

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
    time_t start, end;
    time_t run_time;
    unsigned long i;
    pid_t pids[NUM_OF_CORES];

    /* start of test */
    start = time(NULL);
    for (i = 0; i < NUM_OF_CORES; ++i) {
        if (!(pids[i] = fork())) {
            do_primes();
            exit(0);
        }
        if (pids[i] < 0) {
            perror("Fork");
            exit(1);
        }
    }
    for (i = 0; i < NUM_OF_CORES; ++i) {
        waitpid(pids[i], NULL, 0);
    }
    end = time(NULL);
    run_time = (end - start);
    printf("This machine calculated all prime numbers under %d %d times "
           "in %d seconds\n", MAX_PRIME, NUM_OF_CORES, run_time);
    return 0;
}

Output

$ ./primes 
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
Calculated 9592 primes.
This machine calculated all prime numbers under 100000 8 times in 8 seconds

Answer 3

The reason you're getting 15% on a hex core processor is because your code uses 1 core at 100%. 100/6 = 16.67%, which using a moving average with process scheduling (your process would be running under normal priority) could easily be reported as 15%.

Therefore, in order to use 100% cpu, you would need to use all the cores of your CPU - launch 6 parallel execution code paths for a hex core CPU and have this scale right up to however many processors your Cray machine has :)