On Jul 14, 2009, at 9:03 PM, Klymak Jody wrote:
On 14-Jul-09, at 5:14 PM, Robert Kubrick wrote:
Jody,
Just to make sure, you did set processor affinity during your test
right?
I'm not sure what that means in the context of OS X.
By setting processor affinity you can force execution of each process
on a specific core, thus limiting context switching. I know affinity
wasn't supported on MacOS last year, I don't know if the situation
has changed.
But running oversubscription without process affinity might cancel
the benefit of SMT because the OS will try to allocate each process
to whatever core becomes available, thus increasing context switching.
In facts, thinking about it, I am not even sure how SMT can be
beneficial if the OS is not SMT-aware.
Hyperthreading was turned on.
Cheers, Jody
On Jul 13, 2009, at 9:28 PM, Klymak Jody wrote:
Hi Robert,
I got inspired by your question to run a few more tests. They
are crude, and I don't have actual cpu timing information because
of a library mismatch. However:
Setup:
Xserve, 2x2.26 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon
6.0 Gb memory 1067 MHz DDR3
Mac OS X 10.5.6
Nodes are connected with a dedicated gigabit ethernet switch.
I'm running the MITgcm, a nonhydrostatic global circulation
model. The grid size is modest: 10x150x1600, so bear that in
mind. Message passing is on the dimension that is 150x10, and
typically is 3 grid cells in either direction. I'm not sure how
many variables are passed, but I would guess on the order of 24.
I turned off all the I/O I knew of to reduce disk latency.
1 node: 8 processes: 54 minutes
1 node: 16 processes: 40 minutes (oversubscribed)
2 nodes, 16 processes: 29 minutes
So, oversubscribing was faster (in this case), but it didn't
double the speed. Certainly spreading the load to another node
was much faster.
I haven't had a chance to implement Warner's suggestion of
turning hyperthreading off to see what affect that has on the speed.
Cheers, Jody
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
us...@open-mpi.org
http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/users
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
us...@open-mpi.org
http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/users
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
us...@open-mpi.org
http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/users
