CPU2006 Flag Description
IBM Corporation IBM BladeCenter HS21 (Intel Xeon L5408)

Copyright © 2006 Intel Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Implicitly Included Flags

This section contains descriptions of flags that were included implicitly by other flags, but which do not have a permanent home at SPEC.

• • -O3
  • 

  • Enables O2 optimizations plus more aggressive optimizations, such as prefetching, scalar replacement, and loop and memory access transformations. Enables optimizations for maximum speed, such as:

    • Loop unrolling, including instruction scheduling
    • Code replication to eliminate branches
    • Padding the size of certain power-of-two arrays to allow more efficient cache use.
    
    On IA-32 and Intel EM64T processors, when O3 is used with options -ax or -x (Linux) or with options /Qax or /Qx (Windows), the compiler performs more aggressive data dependency analysis than for O2, which may result in longer compilation times. The O3 optimizations may not cause higher performance unless loop and memory access transformations take place. The optimizations may slow down code in some cases compared to O2 optimizations. The O3 option is recommended for applications that have loops that heavily use floating-point calculations and process large data sets.
  • Includes:
    • -O2
      • -O1
        • -funroll-loops
        • -fno-builtin
        • -mno-ieee-fp
        • -fomit-framepointer
        • -ffunction-sections
        • -ftz
• • -O2
  • 

  • Enables optimizations for speed. This is the generally recommended optimization level. This option also enables:
    - Inlining of intrinsics
    - Intra-file interprocedural optimizations, which include:
    - inlining
    - constant propagation
    - forward substitution
    - routine attribute propagation
    - variable address-taken analysis
    - dead static function elimination
    - removal of unreferenced variables
    - The following capabilities for performance gain:
    - constant propagation
    - copy propagation
    - dead-code elimination
    - global register allocation
    - global instruction scheduling and control speculation
    - loop unrolling
    - optimized code selection
    - partial redundancy elimination
    - strength reduction/induction variable simplification
    - variable renaming
    - exception handling optimizations
    - tail recursions
    - peephole optimizations
    - structure assignment lowering and optimizations
    - dead store elimination
    

  • Includes:
    • -O1
      • -funroll-loops
      • -fno-builtin
      • -mno-ieee-fp
      • -fomit-framepointer
      • -ffunction-sections
      • -ftz
• • -O1
  • 

  • Enables optimizations for speed and disables some optimizations that increase code size and affect speed.
    To limit code size, this option:

    • Enables global optimization; this includes data-flow analysis, code motion, strength reduction and test replacement, split-lifetime analysis, and instruction scheduling.
    • Disables intrinsic recognition and intrinsics inlining.

    The O1 option may improve performance for applications with very large code size, many branches, and execution time not dominated by code within loops.

    -O1 sets the following options:
    -funroll-loops0, -fno-builtin, -mno-ieee-fp, -fomit-framepointer, -ffunction-sections, -ftz
  • Includes:
    • -funroll-loops
    • -fno-builtin
    • -mno-ieee-fp
    • -fomit-framepointer
    • -ffunction-sections
    • -ftz
• • -funroll-loops
  • 

  • Tells the compiler the maximum number of times to unroll loops. For example -funroll-loops0 would disable unrolling of loops.

• • -fno-builtin
  • 

  • -fno-builtin disables inline expansion for all intrinsic functions.

• • -mno-ieee-fp
  • 

  • This option trades off floating-point precision for speed by removing the restriction to conform to the IEEE standard.

• • -fomit-framepointer
  • 

  • EBP is used as a general-purpose register in optimizations.

• • -ffunction-sections
  • 

  • Places each function in its own COMDAT section.

• • -ftz
  • 

  • Flushes denormal results to zero.

• • -ipo
  • 

  • Multi-file ip optimizations that includes:
    - inline function expansion
    - interprocedural constant propogation
    - dead code elimination
    - propagation of function characteristics
    - passing arguments in registers
    - loop-invariant code motion

• • -xT
  • 

  • Code is optimized for Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo processors, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad processors and Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors with SSSE3. The resulting code may contain unconditional use of features that are not supported on other processors. This option also enables new optimizations in addition to Intel processor-specific optimizations including advanced data layout and code restructuring optimizations to improve memory accesses for Intel processors.

    Do not use this option if you are executing a program on a processor that is not an Intel processor. If you use this option on a non-compatible processor to compile the main program (in Fortran) or the function main() in C/C++, the program will display a fatal run-time error if they are executed on unsupported processors.

• • -static
  • 

  • Compiler option to statically link in libraries at link time

• • -no-prec-div
  • 
  • (disable/enable[default] -prec-div)

    -no-prec-div enables optimizations that give slightly less precise results than full IEEE division.

    When you specify -no-prec-div along with some optimizations, such as -xN and -xB (Linux) or /QxN and /QxB (Windows), the compiler may change floating-point division computations into multiplication by the reciprocal of the denominator. For example, A/B is computed as A * (1/B) to improve the speed of the computation.

    However, sometimes the value produced by this transformation is not as accurate as full IEEE division. When it is important to have fully precise IEEE division, do not use -no-prec-div. This will enable the default -prec-div and the result will be more accurate, with some loss of performance.

System and Other Tuning Information

Platform settings

One or more of the following settings may have been set. If so, the "General Notes" section of the report will say so; and you can read below to find out more about what these settings mean.

KMP_STACKSIZE

Specify stack size to be allocated for each thread.

KMP_AFFINITY

KMP_AFFINITY = < physical | logical >, starting-core-id
specifies the static mapping of user threads to physical cores. For example, if you have a system configured with 8 cores, OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 and KMP_AFFINITY=physical,0 then thread 0 will mapped to core 0, thread 1 will be mapped to core 1, and so on in a round-robin fashion.

OMP_NUM_THREADS

Sets the maximum number of threads to use for OpenMP* parallel regions if no other value is specified in the application. This environment variable applies to both -openmp and -parallel (Linux and Mac OS X) or /Qopenmp and /Qparallel (Windows). Example syntax on a Linux system with 8 cores: export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8

Hardware Prefetch:

This BIOS option allows the enabling/disabling of a processor mechanism to prefetch data into the cache according to a pattern-recognition algorithm.

In some cases, setting this option to Disabled may improve performance. Users should only disable this option after performing application benchmarking to verify improved performance in their environment.

Adjacent Sector Prefetch:

This BIOS option allows the enabling/disabling of a processor mechanism to fetch the adjacent cache line within an 128-byte sector that contains the data needed due to a cache line miss.

In some cases, setting this option to Disabled may improve performance. Users should only disable this option after performing application benchmarking to verify improved performance in their environment.

ulimit -s <n>

Sets the stack size to n kbytes, or unlimited to allow the stack size to grow without limit.

submit= MYMASK=`printf '0x%x' $((1<<$SPECCOPYNUM))`; /usr/bin/taskset $MYMASK $command

When running multiple copies of benchmarks, the SPEC config file feature submit is sometimes used to cause individual jobs to be bound to specific processors. This specific submit command is used for Linux. The description of the elements of the command are:

• /usr/bin/taskset [options] [mask] [pid | command [arg] ... ]:
  taskset is used to set or retreive the CPU affinity of a running process given its PID or to launch a new COMMAND with a given CPU affinity. The CPU affinity is represented as a bitmask, with the lowest order bit corresponding to the first logical CPU and highest order bit corresponding to the last logical CPU. When the taskset returns, it is guaranteed that the given program has been scheduled to a legal CPU.
  The default behaviour of taskset is to run a new command with a given affinity mask:
  taskset [mask] [command] [arguments]
• $MYMASK: The bitmask (in hexadecimal) corresponding to a specific SPECCOPYNUM. For example, $MYMASK value for the first copy of a rate run will be 0x00000001, for the second copy of the rate will be 0x00000002 etc. Thus, the first copy of the rate run will have a CPU affinity of CPU0, the second copy will have the affinity CPU1 etc.
• $command: Program to be started, in this case, the benchmark instance to be started.

Flag description origin markings:

	Indicates that the flag description came from the user flags file.
	Indicates that the flag description came from the suite-wide flags file.
	Indicates that the flag description came from a per-benchmark flags file.

For questions about the meanings of these flags, please contact the tester.
For other inquiries, please contact webmaster@spec.org
Copyright 2006-2014 Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
Tested with SPEC CPU2006 v1.0.
Report generated on Tue Jul 22 17:46:49 2014 by SPEC CPU2006 flags formatter v6906.