Thanks for the history lessons, Chris! Very interesting indeed. Would be interesting to take it a step further and measure what the impacts (good, bad, or otherwise) of picking a specific core on a given CPU uArch layout for the OS.
Cheers, Evan On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 10:32 PM, Christopher Samuel <sam...@unimelb.edu.au> wrote: > On 26/07/17 00:31, Evan Burness wrote: > > > If I recall correctly, IBM did just what you're describing with the > > BlueGene CPUs. I believe those were 18-core parts, with 2 of the cores > > being reserved to run the OS and as a buffer against jitter. That left a > > nice, neat power-of-2 amount of cores for compute tasks. > > Close, but the 18 cores were for yield, with 1 core of running the > Compute Node Kernel (CNK) and 16 cores for the task that the CNK would > launch. The 18th was inaccessible. > > But yes, I think SGI (RIP) pioneered this on Intel with their Altix > systems and was the reason they wrote the original cpuset code in the > Linux kernel so they could constrain a set of cores for the boot > services and the rest were there to run jobs on. > > All the best, > Chris > -- > Christopher Samuel Senior Systems Administrator > Melbourne Bioinformatics - The University of Melbourne > Email: sam...@unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545 > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -- Evan Burness Director, HPC Solutions Cycle Computing evan.burn...@cyclecomputing.com (919) 724-9338
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