AIX smtctl The smtctl command controls the enabling and disabling of processor simultaneous multithreading mode.

Description

This command is provided for privileged users and applications to control utilization of processors with simultaneous multithreading support. The simultaneous multithreading mode allows processors to have thread level parallelism at the instruction level. This mode can be enabled or disabled for all processors either immediately or on subsequent boots of the system. This command controls the simultaneous multithreading options.

Each individual Simultaneous Multi-threading (SMT) thread of a physical processor core is treated as an independent logical processor by AIX®. The AIX operating system limits the combination of physical processor cores assigned and SMT modes in order to maintain symmetry across all of the physical processor cores assigned to AIX. Due to this limitation, the number of logical processor is less than or equal to 1024 for AIX 7.1 and 256 for AIX 6.1.

The POWER8® processors are capable of SMT-8 which means up to 128 cores can be used in SMT-8 mode which yields 1024 logical processors. A lower SMT mode must be used for AIX users to be able to use more than 128 POWER8 cores.
Number of thread
When booting a P8 Logical Partition (LPAR), the default number of SMT thread is 4. To increase the default number of SMT threads dynamically, enter:
smtctl -m on
smtctl -t 8Copy
The change to SMT-8 is effective immediately and reboot is not required. If you want the setting to persist after rebooting, then you must rebuild the boot image with the bosboot command. The default SMT-4 is intended for better performance for an existing applications that are not designed or compiled for more than 4 threads.
Number of cores
If you have allocated more than 128 cores to an LPAR, by default it uses 128 cores. This is to ensure that AIX limit of maximum 1024 logical processors is not exceeded if SMT-8 is enabled (128 cores * SMT8 = 1024 total). If you want LPAR to use more than 128 cores, then you need to run a sequence of following AIX commands to establish a limit to the number of SMT threads that are available per core.
smtctl -m limit -t 4
bosboot -a
shutdown -FrCopy
Upon rebooting, AIX negotiates with the firmware to allow up to 256 cores because the operating system's limit of 1024 processors will not be exceeded with the specified limit of 4 SMT threads. You can exceed 256 cores if you run the smtctl command as stated above, but with a limit of 2 instead of 4. The following command suspends SMT capability allowing more cores.
smtctl -m suspend
bosboot -a
shutdown -Fr

My Conclusions

I should note that these were very limited tests and there are many more tests left for me to run in the benchmarking suites that I am testing. Additionally, they don’t test all of the functions of the server and are not a true mixed OLTP workload, which is what most run. However, they do provide some initial data that shows that POWER8 appears to scale as expected, both due to improvements in the memory performance as well as CPU performance. Also the jump from SMT4 to SMT8 provides around a 9 percent boost, which is on a par with what’s predicted in the published rPerf. Further, more detailed tests are planned using several test suites for memory, cpu, I/O and network performance. Although preliminary and limited, they provide a window into the performance potential of the new POWER8 scale-out servers.

Overall, the POWER8 experience has been very positive so far. Firmware and HMC updates went smoothly and the server appears to be performing as expected. This provides a level of confidence that you can move from POWER7 to POWER8 while reducing the VPs or cores in LPARs using rPerf comparisons as an approximate scaling factor.

 
0 (0)
Article Rating (No Votes)
Rate this article
Attachments
There are no attachments for this article.
Comments
There are no comments for this article. Be the first to post a comment.
Full Name
Email Address
Security Code Security Code
Related Articles RSS Feed
Oslevel shows wrong AIX’s level. Why
Viewed 4966 times since Thu, Feb 21, 2019
Finding password rules in AIX
Viewed 2867 times since Mon, May 28, 2018
AIX Undocumented AIX command lquerypv
Viewed 3822 times since Tue, Jul 17, 2018
Convert to Scalable Volume Groups
Viewed 4281 times since Wed, May 30, 2018
Useful AIX general commands
Viewed 12223 times since Wed, Apr 17, 2019
Awesome Command to show top 15 processes using memory on AIX
Viewed 24137 times since Thu, Nov 29, 2018
AIX -- extending Logical Volumes online
Viewed 2945 times since Tue, Mar 12, 2019
bootlist multiple boot logical volume found
Viewed 2883 times since Tue, Apr 16, 2019
List AIX File Systems the Easy Way With the lsvgfs Command
Viewed 2355 times since Thu, Sep 20, 2018
HOWTO: Copy a filesystem on AIX
Viewed 2664 times since Mon, May 28, 2018