On May 7, 2010, at 1:30 AM, John Hearns wrote:
> > Indeed. I have seen some people have HT enabled in the bios just so that
> > they can have the software option of turning them off via linux -- then you
> > can run with HT and without it and see what it does to your specific codes.
>
> I may have missed this on the thread, but how do you do that?
> The Nehalem systems I have came delivered with HT enabled in the BIOS
> - I know it is not a real pain to reboot and configure, but it would
> be a lot easir to leave it on and switch off in software - also if you
> wanted to do back-to-back testing of performance with/without HT.
What we have done is disable one of the 2 hardware threads as follows:
- download and install hwloc (it's very small/simple to install). 1.0rc5 is
the current release, but it's *very* near release; it's very stable.
- run lstopo and look at the physical numbering of the hardware threads in each
core.
- here's an example output from v1.0rc5 lstopo (this is not from a Nehalem
machine, but the same things apply):
-----
# lstopo
Machine (3945MB)
Socket #0
L2 #0 (2048KB) + L1 #0 (16KB) + Core #0
PU #0 (phys=0)
PU #1 (phys=4)
L2 #1 (2048KB) + L1 #1 (16KB) + Core #1
PU #2 (phys=2)
PU #3 (phys=6)
Socket #1
L2 #2 (2048KB) + L1 #2 (16KB) + Core #2
PU #4 (phys=1)
PU #5 (phys=5)
L2 #3 (2048KB) + L1 #3 (16KB) + Core #3
PU #6 (phys=3)
PU #7 (phys=7)
#
-----
- you want to disable the 2nd PU (processing unit) -- i.e., hardware thread --
on each core.
- Do this by echoing 0 to /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/online, where X is each
*phys* value.
- For example:
-----
# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu4/online
# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu5/online
# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu6/online
# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu7/online
# lstopo
Machine (3945MB)
Socket #0
L2 #0 (2048KB) + L1 #0 (16KB) + Core #0 + PU #0 (phys=0)
L2 #1 (2048KB) + L1 #1 (16KB) + Core #1 + PU #1 (phys=2)
Socket #1
L2 #2 (2048KB) + L1 #2 (16KB) + Core #2 + PU #2 (phys=1)
L2 #3 (2048KB) + L1 #3 (16KB) + Core #3 + PU #3 (phys=3)
#
-----
Granted; this doesn't actually disable hyperthreading. But it does disable
Linux from using the 2nd hardware thread on each core, which is pretty much the
same thing for the purposes of this conversation.
--
Jeff Squyres
jsquy...@cisco.com
For corporate legal information go to:
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