multi cpu machines

[John Wendel]

On Friday 23 January 2004 11:48 pm, Alexander Dalloz wrote:

> Am Sa, den 24.01.2004 schrieb don um 08:14:
> > fedora-tester said:
> > > Does anyone know if it is possible to limit user's application
> > > from running on a particular cpu on an smp system?
> >
> > If you can do that, it isn't SYMETRIC-multi-processing.... ;-)
>
> No, as far as I know the symmetric in SMP does not imply that an
> application has to run on both (or all) CPUs the same time.
> Symmetric just means the system's CPUs are sharing same RAM and
> address lines and this way they can't be run absolutely independent
> but have to inform each other about their actual state.
>
> Threaded tasks can be divided to run on all CPUs, so this is one
> scenario from which an application on SMP gains it's boost. But
> there are a lot of applications using just one CPU at time and you
> will only gain improvement towards single CPU system if you run a
> further application at the same time which uses the other CPU.
>
> I do not know an answer to the original question, but on
> Windows[tm] NT based systems you can choose on which CPU an
> application should run.
>
> Alexander


See http://oss.sgi.com/projects

They have some software called "cpumemsets" that claims to address 
this problem. I've never tried it, so I can't comment on whether it 
will work for you.

Regards,

John