CPU2006 Flag Description
Bull SAS NovaScale R440 E2 (Intel Xeon E5540, 2.53 GHz)

This result has been formatted using multiple flags files. The "default header section" from each of them appears next.


Default header section from Intel-ic11.0-int-linux64-revF

SPEC CPU2006 Flag Description for the Intel(R) C++ and Fortran Compiler 11.0 for IA32 and Intel 64 applications

Copyright © 2006 Intel Corporation. All Rights Reserved.


Default header section from NEC-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags-revD

SPEC CPU2006 Software OS and BIOS tuning Descriptions NEC Intel-based systems applications

Copyright © 2007 Intel Corporation. All Rights Reserved.


Base Compiler Invocation

C benchmarks

C++ benchmarks


Peak Compiler Invocation

C benchmarks (except as noted below)

401.bzip2

456.hmmer

458.sjeng

C++ benchmarks (except as noted below)

473.astar


Base Portability Flags

400.perlbench

462.libquantum

483.xalancbmk


Peak Portability Flags

400.perlbench

401.bzip2

456.hmmer

458.sjeng

462.libquantum

473.astar

483.xalancbmk


Base Optimization Flags

C benchmarks

C++ benchmarks


Peak Optimization Flags

C benchmarks

400.perlbench

401.bzip2

403.gcc

429.mcf

445.gobmk

456.hmmer

458.sjeng

462.libquantum

464.h264ref

C++ benchmarks

471.omnetpp

473.astar

483.xalancbmk


Base Other Flags

C benchmarks

403.gcc


Peak Other Flags

C benchmarks

403.gcc


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.


System and Other Tuning Information

Platform settings

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

Adjacent Cache Line 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 limited cases, setting this option to Disabled may improve performance. In the majority of cases, the default value of Enabled provides better performance. Users should only disable this option after performing application benchmarking to verify improved performance in their environment.

Hardware Prefetcher:

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

In some limited cases, setting this option to Disabled may improve performance. In the majority of cases, the default value of Enabled provides better performance. Users should only disable this option after performing application benchmarking to verify improved performance in their environment.

FSB High Bandwidth Optimization:

Enabling this option allows the chipset to defer memory transactions and process them out of order for optimal performance.

Intel SpeedStep Technology:

This BIOS option allows the system to dynamically adjust processorvoltage and core frequency, which results in decreased power consumption, which results in decreased heat production, which in turn allows improved acoustics because fans do not need to spin as quickly.

NUMA configuration:

This BIOS setting when set to NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) configures the system memory into blocks local to each processor. A NUMA-aware operating system can use this configuration to intelligently allocate memory for optimal performance.

Hyper-Threading Technorogy:

This BIOS setting disables/enables Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology. HT enables the processor to allocate an additional thread to a core.

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:

Using numactl to bind processes and memory to cores

For multi-copy runs or single copy runs on systems with multiple sockets, it is advantageous to bind a process to a particular core. Otherwise, the OS may arbitrarily move your process from one core to another. This can effect performance. To help, SPEC allows the use of a "submit" command where users can specify a utility to use to bind processes. We have found the utility 'numactl' to be the best choice.

numactl runs processes with a specific NUMA scheduling or memory placement policy. The policy is set for a command and inherited by all of its children. The numactl flag "--physcpubind" specifies which core(s) to bind the process. "-l" instructs numactl to keep a process memory on the local node while "-m" specifies which node(s) to place a process memory. For full details on using numactl, please refer to your Linux documentation, 'man numactl'

submit= $[top]/mysubmit.pl $SPECCOPYNUM "$command"

On Xeon 74xx series processors, some benchmarks at peak will run n/2 copies on a system with n logical processors. The mysubmit.pl script assigns each copy in such a way that no two copies will share an L2 cache, for optimal performance. The script looks in /proc/cpuinfo to come up with the list of cores that will satisfy this requirement. The source code is shown below.

ulimit -s <n | unlimited>

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

KMP_STACKSIZE=integer[B|K|M|G|T]

Sets the number of bytes to allocate for each parallel thread to use as its private stack. Use the optional suffix B, K, M, G, or T, to specify bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, or terabytes. The default setting is 2M on IA32 and 4M on IA64.

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.

KMP_AFFINITY = granularity=fine,scatter
The value for the environment variable KMP_AFFIINTY affects how the threads from an auto-parallelized program are scheduled across processors.
Specifying granularity=fine selects the finest granularity level, causes each OpenMP thread to be bound to a single thread context.
This ensures that there is only one thread per core on cores supporting HyperThreading Technology
Specifying scatter distributes the threads as evenly as possible across the entire system.
Hence a combination of these two options, will spread the threads evenly across sockets, with one thread per physical core.

OMP_NUM_THREADS=n

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


Flag description origin markings:

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

The flags files that were used to format this result can be browsed at
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Intel-ic11.0-int-linux64-revF.html,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/NEC-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags-revD.html.

You can also download the XML flags sources by saving the following links:
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Intel-ic11.0-int-linux64-revF.xml,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/NEC-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags-revD.xml.


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 v1.1.
Report generated on Tue Jul 22 23:55:56 2014 by SPEC CPU2006 flags formatter v6906.