CPU2006 Flag Description
Oracle Corporation Sun Fire X4470 M2 (Intel Xeon E7-4820 2.0 GHz)

Copyright © 2006 Intel Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Base Compiler Invocation

C benchmarks

C++ benchmarks

Peak Compiler Invocation

C benchmarks (except as noted below)

400.perlbench

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.

Commands and Options Used to Submit Benchmark Runs

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

Submit command from Intel-ic12.1-official-linux64

SPEC CPU2006 Flag Description for the Intel(R) C++ and Fortran Compiler 12.1 for IA32 and Intel 64 applications

submit= MYMASK=`printf '0x%x' $((1<<$SPECCOPYNUM))`; /usr/bin/taskset $MYMASK $command
When running multiple copies of benchmarks, the SPEC config file feature submit is used to cause individual jobs to be bound to specific processors. This specific submit command, using taskset, is used for Linux64 systems without numactl.
Here is a brief guide to understanding the specific command which will be found in the config file:
submit= numactl --localalloc --physcpubind=$SPECCOPYNUM $command
When running multiple copies of benchmarks, the SPEC config file feature submit is used to cause individual jobs to be bound to specific processors. This specific submit command is used for Linux64 systems with support for numactl.
Here is a brief guide to understanding the specific command which will be found in the config file:

Submit command from Oracle-platform-x86_64.CPUv1.2-RevA

SPEC CPU2006 Platform Settings for Intel-based systems

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";

Shell, Environment, and Other Software Settings

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

Sw environment from Intel-ic12.1-official-linux64

SPEC CPU2006 Flag Description for the Intel(R) C++ and Fortran Compiler 12.1 for IA32 and Intel 64 applications

numactl --interleave=all "runspec command"
Launching a process with numactl --interleave=all sets the memory interleave policy so that memory will be allocated using round robin on nodes. When memory cannot be allocated on the current interleave target fall back to other nodes.
KMP_STACKSIZE
Specify stack size to be allocated for each thread.
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
Set stack size to unlimited
The command "ulimit -s unlimited" is used to set the stack size limit to unlimited.
Free the file system page cache
The command "echo 1> /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" is used to free up the filesystem page cache.

Red Hat Specific features

Transparent Huge Pages
On RedHat EL 6 and later, Transparent Hugepages increase the memory page size from 4 kilobytes to 2 megabytes. Transparent Hugepages provide significant performance advantages on systems with highly contended resources and large memory workloads. If memory utilization is too high or memory is badly fragmented which prevents hugepages being allocated, the kernel will assign smaller 4k pages instead.
Hugepages are used by default unless the /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/enabled field is changed from its RedHat EL6 default of 'always'.

Sw environment from Oracle-platform-x86_64.CPUv1.2-RevA

SPEC CPU2006 Platform Settings for Intel-based systems

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
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
ulimit -s <n>
Sets the stack size to n kbytes, or unlimited to allow the stack size to grow without limit.

Operating System Tuning Parameters

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Writing to this will cause the kernel to free pagechace
autoup=<n> (Unix /etc/system)
When the file system flush daemon fsflush runs, it writes to disk all modified file buffers that are more than n seconds old.
psrset -c <n> (Unix, superuser commands)
Creates a new processor set and displays the new processor set ID.
psrset -e <n> (Unix, superuser commands)
Executes a command (with optional arguments) in the specified processor set. The command process and any child processes are executed only by processors in the processor set.
tune_t_fsflushr=<n> (Unix /etc/system)
Controls the number of seconds between runs of the file system flush daemon, fsflush.

Firmware / BIOS / Microcode Settings

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 a 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.
Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch:
This BIOS option allows the enabling/disabling of a processor mechanism to fetch the adjacent cache line within a 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.
L1 Data Prefetch: Enabled:
This BIOS option allows the enabling/disabling L1 cache Data prefetch.
C-State : Disabled
Enable/Disable CPUs to enter C-State (lower power CPU state) while the system is idle. This helps to lower power consumption when enabled.
Data Reuse Optimization : Disabled
Enabling this BIOS option reduces the frequency of L3 cache updates from L1. This may improve performance by reducing the internal bandwidth consumed by constantly updating L1 cache lines in L3. Since this results in more fetches to main memory, setting this option to Disabled may improve performance in some cases. Users should only disable this option after performing application benchmarking to verify improved performance in their environment.
Intel HT Technology : Disabled
This BIOS setting disables/enables Intel Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology. With Intel HT Technology, the operating system can execute two threads in parallel within each processor core.

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-ic12.1-official-linux64.20111122.html,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Oracle-platform-x86_64.CPUv1.2-RevA.html.

You can also download the XML flags sources by saving the following links:
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Intel-ic12.1-official-linux64.20111122.xml,
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/flags/Oracle-platform-x86_64.CPUv1.2-RevA.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 v1.2.
Report generated on Thu Jul 24 01:52:54 2014 by SPEC CPU2006 flags formatter v6906.