CPU affinity for serial jobs (was Re: [Beowulf] VMC - Virtual Machine Console)

[Bernard Li]

Hi Rayson:

On 1/20/08, Rayson Ho <raysonlogin at gmail.com> wrote:

Long time no talk!

> I am working on adding processor affinity support for serial and
> parallel jobs for Grid Engine, and I am working with the OpenMPI
> developers to define an interface.
>
> http://gridengine.sunsource.net/servlets/BrowseList?list=dev&by=thread&from=27044
> http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/devel/2008/01/2949.php
> http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/devel/2008/01/2964.php
>
> BTW, LSF 7.0.2 supports processor affinity for serial jobs. However,
> supporting processor affinity for serial jobs is only useful when the
> OS scheduler is dumb...
>
> See also: "Enhancing an Open Source Resource Manager with
> Multi-Core/Multi-threaded Support" -- this paper talks about the
> support of processor affinity in SLURM:
> http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~feit/parsched/jsspp07/p2-balle.pdf

Thanks for the information.

I get the sense that CPU affinity is beneficial even for
embarrassingly/serial jobs -- however I am curious whether anybody has
actual numbers to back this?  And is the potential benefits worth the
time/effort to set this up rather than let the default Linux scheduler
deal with it.

Cheers,

Bernard