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Subject: Re: Hyperthreading question on duals, I know it's bad but why?

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 09:11:59 09/17/03

Go up one level in this thread


On September 17, 2003 at 11:22:58, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On September 16, 2003 at 22:30:47, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On September 15, 2003 at 14:16:38, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On September 15, 2003 at 13:18:28, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>>>
>>>>On September 14, 2003 at 12:52:54, Sietel Monic wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>My friend runs dual proccessors using hyperthreading so gets 4 threads, I know
>>>>>this is bad for chess. Just dont know why
>>>>
>>>>This is ok. Running with 2 threads on a dual processor with hyperthreading
>>>>enabled is _not_, unless you're running Linux 2.4.x or Windows Server 2003.
>>
>>You sure of this bob?
>
>I am certain.  I have duals all over the place, running 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 (I

Does that say 2.4.20-NUMA

or does it only say 2.4.20 x86 ?

But in general i agree. i find the linux OS as a whole a joke at NUMA machines.
And kernel 2.6 won't be much better either i bet.

>did say I had not tested 2.4.22 yet).  Also, your question is in the wrong
>place.  I didn't write the above.  GCP did.  I responded to it (the response
>appears below)..
>
>
>
>
>>
>>QUADopteron:/diep/latency # uname -a
>>Linux QUADopteron 2.4.19-NUMA #3 SMP Wed Jul 2 18:34:37 CDT 2003 x86_64 unknown
>>
>>Perhaps all you need is a special extension to the kernel.

>We are talking about hyper-threading.  4 logical processors with two real
>processors.  What are you talking about?   The opteron is not hyper-threaded.
>The issue is that the O/S has to recognize that with only two runnable processes
>on a dual-cpu hyper-threaded machine, it needs to run each process on a
>different physical processor for max performance, rather than running both on
>two logical processors that are on the same physical processor, which would
>run much slower.
>
>
>>
>>>Linux 2.4.x won't cut it either.  I use 2.4.21 and it is _not_ SMT-aware.  IE
>>>it will certainly recognize 4 processors, but it doesn't realize that if there
>>>are just two computational tasks to run, they should be run on two physical
>>>processors.  2.4 just runs them on any two logical processors.  When the two
>>>logical processors are on one physical processor, this performs poorly.  Ingo
>>>Molnar did a scheduler that addresses this (or maybe Rick did it).  And it works
>>>well (it has two run queues, one for each physical procesor, rather than four,
>>>one for each logical processor.)  But that isn't in mainstream 2.4 yet (I have
>>>not looked at 2.4.22 closely so it _could_ be there).
>>>
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>GCP



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