Tuesday, April 9, 2013

How many nodes?

Until now I didn't know how many cores I had to work on. The info in /proc/cpuinfo just didn't seem to tie in with what the vendor had supplied.  Then the penny dropped, /proc/cpuinfo only tells you about the current node, while I wanted to find out about the whole cluster. OK, seems obvious now, but here is some useful info I collected along the way.

One thing I haven't found is how to find out how many nodes (hosts) are in your local domain?

I'm adopting the following convention
1. A "chassis" houses one or more nodes.
2. A node contains one or more sockets.
3. A socket holds one processor.
4. A processor contains one or more (CPU) cores.
5. The cores perform FLOPS.

CommandDescription
$cat /proc/cpuinfo List processor information. Each physical chip has a unique ""physical id". Cores of the same chip have the same physical ID but different core ids.
see http://www.richweb.com/cpu_info
This will only tell you about the local node! You will need to SSH into other nodes to work out about them as well.

Useful flags
lm 64 bit support
vmx Intel Virtualization Technology support
ht indicates Hyperthreading support


Useful AWK script here:
http://superuser.com/questions/388115/interpreting-output-of-cat-proc-cpuinfo?rq=1

The head node on my cluster has two sockets, with quad core chips, but with hyperthreading enabled, so that it looks like 16 logical 'processors'.  The calculation nodes also have two sockets, with quad core CPUS, so 8 cores per node. In total I have 216 calculation cores to play with!


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