CPU2006 Flag Description
Hewlett-Packard Company ProLiant DL370 G6 (3.06 GHz, Intel Xeon X5675)

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


Default header section from Intel-ic12.0-linux64-revA

SPEC CPU2006 Flag Description for the Intel(R) C++ and Fortran Compiler 12.0 for IA32 and Intel 64 applications

Copyright © 2006 Intel Corporation. All Rights Reserved.


Default header section from HP-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags

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

Copyright © 2007 Intel Corporation. All Rights Reserved.


Base Compiler Invocation

C benchmarks

C++ benchmarks

Fortran benchmarks

Benchmarks using both Fortran and C


Peak Compiler Invocation

C benchmarks (except as noted below)

482.sphinx3

C++ benchmarks (except as noted below)

450.soplex

Fortran benchmarks

Benchmarks using both Fortran and C


Base Portability Flags

410.bwaves

416.gamess

433.milc

434.zeusmp

435.gromacs

436.cactusADM

437.leslie3d

444.namd

447.dealII

450.soplex

453.povray

454.calculix

459.GemsFDTD

465.tonto

470.lbm

481.wrf

482.sphinx3


Peak Portability Flags

410.bwaves

416.gamess

433.milc

434.zeusmp

435.gromacs

436.cactusADM

437.leslie3d

444.namd

447.dealII

453.povray

454.calculix

459.GemsFDTD

465.tonto

470.lbm

481.wrf


Base Optimization Flags

C benchmarks

C++ benchmarks

Fortran benchmarks

Benchmarks using both Fortran and C


Peak Optimization Flags

C benchmarks

433.milc

470.lbm

482.sphinx3

C++ benchmarks

444.namd

447.dealII

450.soplex

453.povray

Fortran benchmarks

410.bwaves

416.gamess

434.zeusmp

437.leslie3d

459.GemsFDTD

465.tonto

Benchmarks using both Fortran and C

435.gromacs

436.cactusADM

454.calculix

481.wrf


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

This result has been formatted using multiple flags files. The "platform settings" from each of them appears next.


Platform settings from Intel-ic12.0-linux64-revA

SPEC CPU2006 Flag Description for the Intel(R) C++ and Fortran Compiler 12.0 for IA32 and Intel 64 applications

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.

Linux Huge Page settings

In order to take advantage of large pages, your system must be configured to use large pages. To configure your system for huge pages perform the following steps:

Note that further information about huge pages may be found in your Linux documentation file: /usr/src/linux/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt

HUGETLB_MORECORE

Set this environment variable to "yes" to enable applications to use large pages.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so

Setting this environment variable is necessary to enable applications to use large pages.

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.

KMP_AFFINITY = granularity=fine,scatter
The value for the environment variable KMP_AFFINITY 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

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.

High Bandwidth:

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

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:

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.

Source
******************************************************************************************************


#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use Cwd;
 
# The order in which we want copies to be bound to cores
# Copies: 0, 1, 2, 3
# Cores:  0, 1, 3, 6
 
my $rundir        = getcwd;
 
my $copynum = shift @ARGV;

my $i;
my $j;
my $tag;
my $num;
my $core;
my $numofcores; 

my @proc;
my @cores;

open(INPUT, "/proc/cpuinfo") or
   die "can't open /proc/cpuinfo\n"; 

#open(OUTPUT, "STDOUT");

# proc[i][0] = logical processor ID
# proc[i][1] = physical processor ID
# proc[i][2] = core ID

$i = 0;
$numofcores = 0;

while(<INPUT>)
{
  chop;
 
  ($tag, $num) = split(/\s+:\s+/, $_);


  if ($tag eq "processor") {
      $proc[$i][0] = $num;
  }

  if ($tag eq "physical id") {
      $proc[$i][1] = $num;
  }

  if ($tag eq "core id") {
      $proc[$i][2] = $num;
      $i++;
      $numofcores++;
  }
}

$i = 0;
$j = 0;

for $core (0, 4, 2, 1, 5, 3) {
  while ($i < $numofcores) {
     if ($proc[$i][2] == $core) {
        $cores[$j] = $proc[$i][0];
        $j++;
     }
     $i++;
  }
  $i=0;
}

open  RUNCOMMAND, "> runcommand" or die "failed to create run file";
print RUNCOMMAND "cd $rundir\n";
print RUNCOMMAND "@ARGV\n";
close RUNCOMMAND;
system 'taskset', '-c', $cores[$copynum], 'sh', "$rundir/runcommand";


Platform settings from HP-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags

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

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.

Power Regulator for ProLiant support (Default=HP Dynamic Power Savings Mode)

Values for this BIOS setting can be:

HP Power Profile (Default = Balanced Power and Performance):

Values for this BIOS setting can be:

Power Efficiency Mode (Default=Efficiency)

Values for this BIOS setting can be:

Adjacent Sector Prefetch (Default = Enabled):

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 Prefetch (Default = Enabled):

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.

Data Reuse (Default = Enabled):

This BIOS option allows the enabling/disabling of the Data Reuse optimization.

Enabling this option reduces the frequency of L3 cache updates from the L1 cache. This may improve performance by reducing the internal bandwidth consumed by constantly updating L1 cache lines in the L3 cache.

Since this optimization results in more fetches to main memory, 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.

Turbo Mode (Default = Enabled):

Turbo Boost Technology is a processor feature which allows the processor to transition to a higher frequency than the processor's rate speed if the processor has available power headroom and is within tempereature specifications. Disabling this feature will reduce power usage but will reduce the system's maximum achievable performance under some workloads.

Thermal Configuration (Default = Optimal Cooling):

This feature allows the user to select the fan cooling solution for the system. Values for this BIOS option can be:

Defer All Transactions Mode (Default = Disabled):

When this option is enabled, front-side bus bandwidth may be increased on systems with heavy I/O workload because CPU initiated I/O transactions can be deferred enabling other transactions to make progress while data is retrieved. However, latency for completing transactions may also increase. The system's workload will determine which setting will provide highest performance.

Memory Speed with 2DPC (Default=1066MHz@1.35V)

Sets the memory speed and voltage setting for system when there are 2 DIMMs per channel (2DPC). Values for this BIOS setting can be:

SATA #1 Controller (Default=Auto)

Sets the mode for the embedded controller. The values for this BIOS setting can be:

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'

mysubmit.pl

This perl script is used to ensure that for a system with N cores the first N/2 benchmark copies are bound to a core that does not share its L2 cache with any of the other copies. The script does this by retrieving and using CPU data from /proc/cpuinfo. Note this script will only work for 6-core CPUs.

ulimit -s [n | unlimited] (Linux)

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] (Linux)

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=physical,n (Linux)

Assigns threads to consecutive physical processors (for example, cores), beginning at processor n. Specifies the static mapping of user threads to physical cores, beginning at processor n. For example, if a system is configured with 8 cores, and OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 and KMP_AFFINITY=physical,2 are set, then thread 0 will mapped to core 2, thread 1 will be mapped to core 3, and so on in a round-robin fashion.

KMP_AFFINITY=granularity=fine,scatter

The value for the environment variable KMP_AFFINITY 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.

vm.max_map_count-n (Linux)

The maximum number of memory map areas a process may have. Memory map areas are used as a side-effect of calling malloc, directly by mmap and mprotect, and also when loading shared libraries.


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-ic12.0-linux64-revA.html,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/HP-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags.20110216.00.html.

You can also download the XML flags sources by saving the following links:
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Intel-ic12.0-linux64-revA.xml,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/HP-Intel-Linux-Settings-flags.20110216.00.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 Wed Jul 23 15:06:40 2014 by SPEC CPU2006 flags formatter v6906.