Running Zerene on NUMA Architecture

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J_Rogers
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Running Zerene on NUMA Architecture

Post by J_Rogers »

The question is; will Zerene efficiently scale with dual CPU systems? I know the topic about increasing speed has been brought up in the past, the easiest solution is running multiple instances to utilize the overlap in cores performing different threaded tasks. Theoretically, shouldn't multiple CPU's with non-uniform memory access accomplish this in a similar fashion?

Upgrading my work PC & ultimately I am trying to decide whether or not to part it out, or use it as a personal "workstation."
It is a dual Xeon Gold 6150 system running 512gb RDIMM ECC ram. Unfortunately I cannot outright test this at the moment since it is running RHEL. I'm sure its possible but id rather just buy a Windows server license.

rjlittlefield
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Re: Running Zerene on NUMA Architecture

Post by rjlittlefield »

There is no code in Zerene Stacker that explicitly understands about NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture).

As a result, in principle, performance on dual CPU systems could depend in awkward ways on interactions between the address reference patterns used by the software, the memory coherence protocols used by the hardware, and thread-to-processor assignments provided by the operating system.

Historically, I do not recall anybody reporting painful results with Zerene Stacker on dual Xeon systems. However, I am certainly not going to say "yeah, it works fine". There could be devils lurking in the details of any particular system, and the only way to tell for sure is to try it.

--Rik

J_Rogers
Posts: 87
Joined: Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:29 pm
Location: North Carolina, USA

Re: Running Zerene on NUMA Architecture

Post by J_Rogers »

Thanks for the response Rik! I suspected that the results would vary on a per system basis since dual CPU configurations are rather temperamental with software. If I find the time after I downgrade the computer Ill try to run a test with it. There is a good chance a modern single CPU will outperform simply by the time spent switching between single threaded tasks.

I once attempted Photoshop with my old workstation (dual Xeon E5-2690) and it was hilariously bad.

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