Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

By The Way, How Many NUMA Nodes Is Your AMD Opteron 6100-Based Server?

In my on-going series about Oracle Database 11g configuration for NUMA systems I’ve spoken of the enabling parameter and how it changed from _enable_NUMA_optimization (11.1) to _enable_NUMA_support (11.2). For convenience sake I’ll point to the other two posts in the series for folks that care to catch up.

• You Buy a NUMA System, Oracle Says Disable NUMA! What Gives? Part II.
• You Buy a NUMA System, Oracle Says Disable NUMA! What Gives? Part I.

What does AMD Opteron 6100 (Magny-Cours) have to do with my on-going series on enabling/disabling NUMA features in Oracle Database? That’s a good question. However, wouldn’t it be premature to just presume each of these 12-core processors is a NUMA node?

The AMD Opteron 6100 is a Multi-Chip Module (MCM). The “package” is two hex-core processors essentially “glued” together and placed into a socket. Each die has its own memory controller (hint, hint). I wonder what the Operating System sees in the case of a 4-socket server? Let’s take a peek.

The following is output from the numactl(8) command on a 4s48c Opteron 6100 (G34)-based server:

# numactl --hardware
available: 8 nodes (0-7)
node 0 size: 8060 MB
node 0 free: 7152 MB
node 1 size: 16160 MB
node 1 free: 16007 MB
node 2 size: 8080 MB
node 2 free: 8052 MB
node 3 size: 16160 MB
node 3 free: 15512 MB
node 4 size: 8080 MB
node 4 free: 8063 MB
node 5 size: 16160 MB
node 5 free: 15974 MB
node 6 size: 8080 MB
node 6 free: 8051 MB
node 7 size: 16160 MB
node 7 free: 15519 MB
node distances:
node   0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7
  0:  10  16  16  22  16  22  16  22
  1:  16  10  22  16  16  22  22  16
  2:  16  22  10  16  16  16  16  16
  3:  22  16  16  10  16  16  22  22
  4:  16  16  16  16  10  16  16  22
  5:  22  22  16  16  16  10  22  16
  6:  16  22  16  22  16  22  10  16
  7:  22  16  16  22  22  16  16  10

Heft
It wasn’t that long ago that an 8-node NUMA system was so large that a fork lift was necessary to move it about (think Sequent, SGI, DG, DEC etc). Even much more recent 8-socket (thus 8 NUMA nodes) servers were a 2-man lift and quite large (e.g., 7U HP Proliant DL785). These days, however, an 8-node NUMA system like the AMD Opteron 6100 (G34) comes in a 2U package!

Is it time yet to stop thinking that NUMA is niche technology?

I’ll blog soon about booting Oracle to test NUMA optimizations on these 8-node servers.