I did not check, but would not expect any significant performance impact. With the 84 msec choice of scrub times, we are only touching about a dozen cache lines (64 bytes each) per second. I don't see how this could have a significant impact on performance.

Cheers,
        Bruce

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, stephen mulcahy wrote:

Hi Bruce,

Do you have any idea what the performance impact from enabling scrubbing
is on your systems? did you do any before/after benchmarking?

Thanks,

-stephen

Bruce Allen wrote:
On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Mark Hahn wrote:

    ECC Features
        ECC    Enabled
        ECC Scrub Redirection    Enabled
        Dram ECC Scrub CTL    Disabled
        Chip-Kill    Disabled
        DCACHE ECC Scrub CTL    Disabled
        L2 ECC Scrub CTL    Disabled

You can find our systems BIOS/ECC/Scrub settings here:
http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/beowulf/nemo/construction/BIOS/bios_settings.txt

Our systems are Supermicro H8SSL-i motherboards, with a
Serverworks/Broadcom HT1000 chipset and a single Opteron 175 (dual core,
2.2 GHz).

The ECC part is:
 DRAM ECC Enable = Enabled
 MCA DRAM ECC Logging = Enabled
 DRAM Scrub Redirect = Enabled
 DRAM BG Scrub = 2.62ms
 L2 Cache BG Scrub = 84.00ms
 Data Cache BG Scrub = 84.00ms

Scrubbing is done one cache line (64) bytes at a time.  Thus with 2GB of
memory and DRAM background scrub interval of 2.62ms we will scrub the
entire memory in approximately:

2 GB/64 Bytes * 2.62 ms = 2^31 / 2^6 * 2.62 ms = 87912 secs

So our choices correspond to one complete scrub of DRAM per day.  Our
settings scrub the L2 cache more often: about once every half hour.
Just modify the calculation above, using 1MB instead of 2GB, and 84 ms
instead of 2.62 ms.  One finds that the L2 cache is scrubbed about once
every 1376 seconds (every 23 minutes).

Cheers,
    Bruce


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