numa

In preparation for a research project and potential UKOUG conference papers I am researching the effect of NUMA on x86 systems.

NUMA is one of the key features to understand in modern computer organisation, and I recommend reading “Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach” from Hennessy and Patterson (make sure you grab the 5th edition). Read the chapter about cache optimisation and also the appendix about the memory hierarchy!

Now why should you know NUMA? First of all there is an increasing number of multi-socket systems. AMD has pioneered the move to a lot of cores, but Intel is not far behind. Although AMD is currently leading in the number of cores (“modules”) on a die, Intel doesn’t need to: the Sandy-Bridge EP processors are way more powerful on a one-to-one comparison than anything AMD has at the moment.

Ages ago I blogged about the Intel topology tool and mapping Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) processor threads to OS CPUs on Linux. I don’t recall if I ever blogged the same about Xeon 5600 (Westmere EP) but I’ll cover that processor and Xeon E5-2600 in this short post.  Fist, Xeon 5600.

The following two screen shots are socket 0 and socket 1 from a Xeon 5600 server. Socket 0 first:

Now, socket 1:

As promised, I have attached the slide deck we used for our presentation at Oracle Open World.  A big thanks to Allan for asking me to help… glad to do it!

ID#: S315915
Title: Optimizing Oracle Databases on Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers
Track: Sun SPARC Servers
Date: 20-SEP-10
Time: 12:30 – 13:30
Venue: Moscone South
Room: Rm 270
Slides : oow2010_db_on_mseries.pdf

There are a bunch of OTN white papers that were produced to show how to run the Oracle stack best on Sun servers.  I will try to post an index soon but feel free to peruse the OTN site, there is lots of new content.