Morton Ordering on the Intel Xeon Phi

The Morton order is a mapping of multidimensional data to one dimension that preserves locality of the data. This is also known as Z-order. “By using Morton ordering as an alternative to row-major or column-major data storage, significant speedups can be achieved on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor or Intel Xeon CPU when performing matrix multiplies or matrix transposes.”

Optimization Through Profiling

Through profiling, developers and users can get ideas on where an application’s hotspots are, in order to optimize certain sections of the code. In addition to locating where time is spent within an application, profiling tools can locate where there is little or no parallelism and a number of other factors that may affect performance. Performance tuning can help tremendously in many cases.