Specifications

April 2012 v1 AMD Opteron™ 6200 Linux Tuning Guide

9. Virtualization, AMD V = Disabled.

10. OS Power Management = Disabled.

Note: Always refer to your motherboard or system’s owner’s manual for further BIOS setting information.

For production HPC system BIOS recommendations, see section 4.0 Conﬁgure a Performant Production

System below. See also the BIOS and Kernel Developer’s Guide (BKDG) at: http://support.amd.com/us/

Processor_TechDocs/42301_15h_Mod_00h-0Fh_BKDG.pdf. Always refer to your motherboard or system

BIOS info in your owner’s manual.

11. Install a new Linux distribution (e.g., SLES11sp1 or 2 or OpenSUSE12.1).

The most recent version and update of other Linux distributions would also work for these tests (e.g.,

RHEL6.1); however, the instructions for disabling speed stepping differ among distributions.

12. After installation, disable automatic power state management so that the core frequency will remain at

full speed by running the following command as root (for SLES11sp1):

powersave -f

Next, you can begin to verify the memory performance of your new system.

2.3 Check NUMA Conﬁguration

Run numactl --hardware at the command line and check that the size of memory on each node is as

expected (e.g., on the 2P system, check that 25% of the total installed memory is on each node). You should

also expect that the free: on each node to be similar on each node and close to the size: on each node

(size: is shown in red and free: is shown in blue below).

In the following example, up to 3GB is in use on node 2 since something was running at the time numactl

--hardware was running; however, when run immediately after system boot, the free: should be close to

size:.

bash> numactl --hardware

available: 4 nodes (0-3)

node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

node 0 size: 16382 MB

node 0 free: 14730 MB

node 1 cpus: 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

node 1 size: 16384 MB

node 1 free: 15539 MB

node 2 cpus: 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

node 2 size: 16384 MB

node 2 free: 13467 MB

node 3 cpus: 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

node 3 size: 16368 MB

node 3 free: 15401 MB