CPU2006 Flag Description
NEC Corporation Express5800/A1080a-S (Intel Xeon E7-8830)

Copyright © 2006 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

Base Portability Flags

400.perlbench

462.libquantum

483.xalancbmk

Peak Portability Flags

400.perlbench

401.bzip2

456.hmmer

458.sjeng

462.libquantum

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 "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.

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

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

Patrol Scrub:

This is a background activity initiated by the processor to seek out and fix memory errors. Patrol Scrub scans all of memory doing simulated "READs" while checking for ECC errors. If any ECC errors are detected during this process, they are logged as Patrol errors. Correctable errors are corrected and written back into memory. This mode is able to set to "Enable" or "Disable" in Maintenance Console.

zone_reclaim_mode

Zone_reclaim_mode allows someone to set more or less aggressive approaches to reclaim memory when a zone runs out of memory. If it is set to zero then no zone reclaim occurs. Allocations will be satisfied from other zones / nodes in the system.

This is value ORed together of

1 = Zone reclaim on
2 = Zone reclaim writes dirty pages out
4 = Zone reclaim swaps pages

zone_reclaim_mode is set during bootup to 1 if it is determined that pages from remote zones will cause a measurable performance reduction. The page allocator will then reclaim easily reusable pages (those page cache pages that are currently not used) before allocating off node pages.

It may be beneficial to switch off zone reclaim if the system is used for a file server and all of memory should be used for caching files from disk. In that case the caching effect is more important than data locality.

Allowing zone reclaim to write out pages stops processes that are writing large amounts of data from dirtying pages on other nodes. Zone reclaim will write out dirty pages if a zone fills up and so effectively throttle the process. This may decrease the performance of a single process since it cannot use all of system memory to buffer the outgoing writes anymore but it preserve the memory on other nodes so that the performance of other processes running on other nodes will not be affected.

Allowing regular swap effectively restricts allocations to the local node unless explicitly overridden by memory policies or cpuset configurations.

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 affect 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";

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-revB.20110705.html,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/NEC-platform-linux64-revB.html.

You can also download the XML flags sources by saving the following links:
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Intel-ic12.0-linux64-revB.20110705.xml,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/NEC-platform-linux64-revB.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 Thu Jul 24 01:50:05 2014 by SPEC CPU2006 flags formatter v6906.