Processor Affinity

Each JUWELS Cluster compute node consists of two sockets, each with one CPU. Each CPU has 24 physical and 48 logical cores, so that one JUWELS Cluster compute node consists 48 physical and 96 logical cores distributed on two NUMA domains.

The JUWELS Booster compute nodes also feature two CPUs, 48 physical cores per node but eight separate NUMA domains.

Warning

This documentation page is currently out of date due to a Slurm upgrade to version 22.05 which can have a major impact on the performance of your application. We are working on an update.

  • Unless running on SMT is explicitly requested, we strongly recommend using the --hint=nomultithread option (which implies --threads-per-core=1). If you want to use SMT we would recommend to set --distribution=block:cyclic:cyclic.

  • srun will no longer read in SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK and will not inherit option --cpus-per-task from sbatch! This means you will explicitly have to specify –cpus-per-task to your srun calls, or set the new SRUN_CPUS_PER_TASK env var. If you want to keep using –cpus-per-task with sbatch then you will have to add: export SRUN_CPUS_PER_TASK=${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK}.

  • Using the option --cpus-per-task in 22.05 does imply --exact, which means that each step with --cpus-per-task will now only get the minimum number of cores. The pinning will change (implication on the performance) and the tasks will fill the HW threads of same cores. If you don’t use SMT and want to keep old behavior as before where your threads run only on real cores then add this to srun: --threads-per-core=1.

  • If you have any questions, please contact SC support [sc@fz-juelich.de].

Pinning, the binding of a process or thread to a specific core, can improve the performance of your code by increasing the percentage of local memory accesses. Once your code runs and produces correct results on a system, the next step is performance improvement. For a code that uses multiple cores, the placement of processes and/or threads can play a significant role in performance.

In general, the Linux scheduler will periodically (re-)distribute all running processes across all available threads to ensure similar usage of the threads. This causes processes being moved from one thread, core, or socket to another within the compute node. Note that the allocated memory of a process does not necessarily move at the same time (or at all), possibly making access to memory much slower. To avoid such a potential performance loss by process migration, processes are usually pinned (or bound) to a logical core through the resource management system, SLURM in case of JUWELS. A pinned process (consisting of one or more threads) is bound to a specific set of cores and will only run on the cores in this set. The set can be a single or multiple logical cores that implicitly includes 1st and 2nd level caches and is defined with an affinity mask. Since the majority of applications benefit from strict pinning that prevents migration – unless explicitly prevented – all tasks in a job step are pinned to a set of cores by default. Further information about the default behaviour can be found below.

Note

Even though the default setting improves the performance of average applications over no process binding at all, specialised settings for your application can yield even better performance. Pay attention to maximizing data locality while minimizing latency and resource contention, and have a clear understanding of the characteristics of your own code and the machine that the code is running on.

Slurm options

Slurm allows users to modify the process affinity by means of the --cpu-bind, --distribution and --hint options to srun. While the available options to srun are standard across all Slurm installations, the implementation of process affinity is done in plugins and thus may differ between installations. On JUWELS a custom pinning implementation by ParTec is used (psslurm). In contrast to other options, the processor affinity options need to be directly passed to srun and must not be given to sbatch or salloc. In particular, the option cannot be specified in the header of a batch script.

Note

It is important to specify the correct --cpus-per-task count to ensure a proper affinity mask for hybrid applications and set the environment variable OMP_NUM_THREADS correspondingly. However, the individual threads of each MPI rank can still be moved between the logical threads matching the affinity mask of this rank. To also avoid this behaviour, there are diffenrent possibilities to pin the threads to specific logical cores within the mask, e.g., by the OpenMP runtime library: Intel: KMP_AFFINITY, GNU: GOMP_AFFINITY or with the API of sched_setaffinity or kmp_set_affinity among others.

Terminology

thread

One CPU thread.

task

Part of a job consisting of a number of requested CPU threads (specified by -c, --cpus-per-task). Usually this is a process.

core

One physical CPU core can run multiple CPU threads. The CPU threads sitting on the same physical core are sharing caches (traditional name of the second memory locality domain)

socket

Consists of a number of CPU threads with the same memory locality (traditional name of the top most memory locality domain)

--cpu-bind

--cpu-bind=[{quiet,verbose},none|rank|map_cpu:<list>|mask_cpu:<list>|rank_ldom|map_ldom:<list>|mask_ldom:<list>|sockets|cores|threads|ldoms|boards]

Implicit types

none

Do not bind tasks to CPUs

rank

Each task is pinned to as many threads as it requests, just filling cores consecutively. Spread the threads and tasks to as many cores as possible. This type is not influenced by the second and third part of the --distribution option. (old default until 12th May 2020)

threads

Each task is pinned to as many threads as it requests. Which threads each process gets is controlled by the --distribution option. (Default)

rank_ldom

Each task is pinned to as many threads as it requests, just filling the nodes rank by rank cycling sockets and cores. This type is not influenced by the second and third level of the –distribution option. The threads of a task are always packed to as few cores as possible. This is the same as --cpu-bind=threads --distribution=*:cyclic:block

sockets

In a first step the requested CPU threads of a task are assigned in exactly the same way as with --cpu-bind=threads. But the final affinity mask for the task is the whole socket where any thread is located that it is assigned to. This means if a task is assigned to any thread that is part of a socket, it will be bound to the whole socket. (The ‘whole’ here means to each thread of the socket that is allocated to the job)

cores

In a first step the requested CPU threads of a task are assigned in exactly the same way as with --cpu-bind=threads. But the final affinity mask for the task is the whole core where any thread is located that it is assigned to. This means if a task is assigned to any thread that is part of a core, it will be bound to the whole core. (The ‘whole’ here means to each thread of the core that is allocated to the job)

ldoms

This is the same as --cpu-bind=sockets

boards

Currently not supported on systems with more than one board per node. JUWELS has only one board: same behavivor as none

Explicit types

map_cpu:<list>

Explicit passing of maps or masks to pin the tasks to threads in a round-robin fashion.

mask_cpu:<list>

map_ldom:<list>

Explicit passing of maps or masks to pin the tasks to sockets in a round-robin fashion.

mask_ldom:<list>

--distribution

The string passed to --distribution/-m can have up to four parts separated by colon and comma:

  • The first part controls the distribution of the task over the nodes.

  • The second part controls the distribution of tasks over sockets inside one node.

  • The third part controls the distribution of tasks over cores inside one node.

  • The fourth part is an additional information concerning the distribution of tasks over nodes.

--distribution/-m=<node_level>[:<socket_level>[:<core_level>[,Pack|NoPack]]]

First part (node_level)

*

The default is block

block

Distribute tasks to a node such that consecutive tasks share a node

cyclic

Distribute tasks to a node such that consecutive tasks are distributed over consecutive nodes (in a round-robin fashion)

arbitrary

see https://slurm.schedmd.com/srun.html

plane=<options>

see https://slurm.schedmd.com/dist_plane.html

Second part (socket_level)

*

The default is cyclic

block

Each socket is first filled with tasks before the next socket will be used.

cyclic

Each task will be assigned to the next socket(s) in a round-robin fashion.

fcyclic

Each thread inside a task will be assigned to the next socket in a round-robin fashion, spreading the task itself as much as possible over all sockets. fcyclic implies cyclic.

Third part (core_level)

*

The default is fcyclic

block

Each core is first filled with tasks before the next core will be used.

cyclic

Each task will be assigned to the next core(s) in a round-robin fashion. The threads of a task will fill the cores.

fcyclic

Each thread inside a task will be assigned to the next core in a round-robin fashion, spreading the task itself as much as possible over all cores. fcyclic implies cyclic.

Fourth part

Optional control for task distribution over nodes.

Pack

Default is NoPack. See: https://slurm.schedmd.com/srun.html

NoPack

--hint

If the hint nomultithread is given, the affinity will be set as if there were only one thread per core on the nodes and an error message will be thrown if the total amount of the threads you are trying to use per node is higher than available amount of physical hardware threads.

--hint=nomultithread

Note

The hints compute_bound and memory_bound are currently not supported.

Affinity examples

Visualization of the processor affinity in the following examples is done by the tool psslurmgetbind which is also available on the login nodes of JUWELS. The displayed scheme represents one node of JUWELS which has two sockets divided by the blank space in the middle. Each column corresponds to one core; the first row shows the first (physical) thread of the corresponding core and the second row the SMT (logical thread) of the core. The number (X) followed by a : in the line above the described scheme represents the MPI task number for which the affinity mask is shown in the scheme. The number 1 in the scheme itself indicates that the task with its threads is scheduled on the corresponding hardware thread of the node.

Example: One MPI task with two threads:

_images/psslurmgetbind_juwels.jpg

Further examples with a colored representation can be found here Talk: Pinning with psslurm.

Default processor affinity

The default processor affinity has changed at 12th May 2020 to the following setting:

--cpu-bind=threads --distribution=block:cyclic:fcyclic

The behavior of this combination is shown in the following examples for JUWELS.

Example 1: Pure MPI application filling only the first thread of a core on a node:

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=48 --cpus-per-task=1
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 48 -c 1
        0:
            100000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            000000000000000000000000 100000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
                                   ...
        2:
            010000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        3:
            000000000000000000000000 010000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
                                   ...
        46:
            000000000000000000000001 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        47:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000

Example 2: Pure MPI application filling all all threads on a node (including SMT):

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=96 --cpus-per-task=1
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 96 -c 1
        0:
            100000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            000000000000000000000000 100000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
                                   ...
        46:
            000000000000000000000001 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        47:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        48:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            100000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        49:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 100000000000000000000000
                                   ...
        94:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000001 000000000000000000000000
        95:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001

Example 3: Hybrid application (MPI + OpenMP) with 4 tasks per node and 16 Threads per task:

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=4 --cpus-per-task=16
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 4 -c 16
        0:
            111111111111111100000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            000000000000000000000000 111111111111111100000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        2:
            000000000000000011111111 000000000000000000000000
            111111110000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        3:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000011111111
            000000000000000000000000 111111110000000000000000

Example 4: Pure OpenMP application with 48 Threads:

srun --nodes=1 --cpus-per-task=48
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 1 -c 48
        0:
            111111111111111111111111 000000000000000000000000
            111111111111111111111111 000000000000000000000000

Further examples

Example 1: Hybrid application (MPI + OpenMP) with 4 tasks per node and 16 Threads per tasks using --distribution=*:*:cyclic. Most of the hybrid applications using more than tasks-per-node * cpus-per-tasks > 48 per node on JUWELS should benefit from this setting:

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=4 --cpus-per-task=16 --distribution=*:*:cyclic
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 4 -c 16 --distribution=*:*:cyclic
        0:
            111111110000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            111111110000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            000000000000000000000000 111111110000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 111111110000000000000000
        2:
            000000001111111100000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000001111111100000000 000000000000000000000000
        3:
            000000000000000000000000 000000001111111100000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000001111111100000000

Example 2: Pure MPI application using only the first thread of a core on a node with --cpu-bind=rank

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=48 --cpus-per-task=1 --cpu-bind=rank
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 48 -c 1 --cpu-bind=rank
        0:
            100000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            010000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
                                ...
        46:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000010
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        47:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000

Example 3: Pure MPI application filling all all threads on a node (including SMT) with --cpu-bind=rank

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=96 --cpus-per-task=1 --cpu-bind=rank
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 96 -c 1 --cpu-bind=rank
        0:
            100000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            010000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
                                   ...
        46:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000010
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        47:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        48:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            100000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        49:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            010000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
                                   ...
        94:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000010
        95:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001

Example 4: Hybrid application (MPI + OpenMP) with 4 tasks per node and 16 Threads per task --cpu-bind=rank

srun --nodes=1 --tasks-per-node=4 --cpus-per-task=16 --cpu-bind=rank
$ psslurmgetbind 2 24 2 -h : -n 4 -c 16 --cpu-bind=rank
        0:
            111111111111111100000000 000000000000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        1:
            000000000000000011111111 111111110000000000000000
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        2:
            000000000000000000000000 000000001111111111111111
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
        3:
            000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000
            111111111111111100000000 000000000000000000000000

Examples for manual pinning

For advanced use cases it can be desirable to manually specify the binding masks or core sets for each task. This is possible using the options --cpu-bind=map_cpu and --cpu-bind=mask_cpu. For example,

srun -n 2 --cpu-bind=map_cpu:1,5

spawns two tasks pinned to core 1 and 5, respectively. The command

srun -n 2 --cpu-bind=mask_cpu:0x3,0xC

spawns two tasks pinned to cores 0 and 1 (0x3 = 3 = 2^0 + 2^1) and cores 2 and 3 (0xC = 12 = 2^2 + 2^3), respectively.

Affinity visualisation

You can use a web interface, available at https://apps.fz-juelich.de/jsc/llview/pinning, to test and visualise different SLURM affinity setups by yourself.

Differences to vanilla Slurm (19.05)

  • Auto binding is not supported in psslurm

  • --cpu-bind=boards is not supported

  • The option --cpu-bind=rank is implemented differently in psslurm, since it is redundant and makes no sense without auto-pin. Slurm completely ignores the --cpus-per-task option here, psslurm does not.

  • psslurm does NOT YET differentiate ldoms from sockets. This keywords are currently used equivalent.

  • psslurm does not consider the values given to the options --ntasks-per-core and --ntasks-per-socket. (As far as we could observe, Slurm does neither, even though it is described otherwise in the srun manpage.)

  • The hints compute_bound and memory_bound are currently not supported.

  • psslurm follows what is described at the srun manpage. (In many cases, Slurm does not.)