This chapter provides an introduction to SGI Performance Suite 1.2 release, describes its contents, and provides documentation information. It covers the following topics:
The SGI Performance Suite 1.2 is software that accelerates the performance of applications running on the Linux operating system. It consists of the components described in the following sections:
SGI Performance Suite 1.2 is fully supported on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 (SLES 11 SP1) base distribution or the Red Hat Enterprise Server 6 (RHEL 6) base distribution. SGI Performance Suite software (with the exception of SGI REACT) also runs on the Community ENTerprise Operating System 6 (CentOS 6) base distribution. While SGI support will answer questions relating to any of these products, it does not provide technical support for the CentOS operating system.
SGI hardware platforms and OS configuration settings supported by SGI in this release are documented at the following URL:
This section describes the main contents of the SGI Performance Suite 1.2 release. Manuals associated with the SGI Performance Suite software can be found at the SGI Technical Publications Library located at: http://docs.sgi.com.
SGI® MPI is a scalable, high performance message passing interface (MPI) environment including the following software packages:
Message Passage Toolkit (MPT) software stack (sgi-mpt)
PerfBoost
SGI PerfBoost uses a wrapper library to run applications compiled against other MPI implementations under the SGI Message Passing Toolkit (MPT) product on SGI platforms
memacct
Memory accounting utility (see the memacct(3) man page)
sgi-mpt-shmem
Contains the SGI implementation of SHEM which are shared, distributed memory access (SHMEM) routines (see next bullet item)
xpmem
SGI's NUMAlink technology and the XPC and XPMEM kernel modules allows users to create a very low latency, very large, shared-memory cluster for optimized use of Message Passing Interface (MPI) software and logically shared, distributed memory access (SHMEM) routines. The globally addressable, cache coherent, shared memory is exploited by MPI and SHMEM to deliver high performance.
MPInside
MPInside is a MPI profiling tool which provides valuable information to help MPI application developers to optimize their application.
For more information, see these related manuals:
Message Passing Toolkit (MPT) User's Guide
MPInside 3.1 Reference Manual (ships with the MPInside software module only)
Linux Application Tuning Guide for SGI X86-64 Based Systems
For more information on xpmem and SHMEM, see the “System Partitioning” section of Chapter 2. “Configuring Your System” in the SGI Altix UV Systems Linux Configuration and Operations Guide.
SGI® REACT™ is hard real-time performance solution for Linux and includes the following software packages:
Linux REACT stack
External interrupt driver
REACT/Pro Frame Scheduler
The REACT/Pro Frame Scheduler is an execution manager that schedules pthreads or processes on one or more CPUs in a predefined cyclic order (see the frs(3) man page).
Kernel barrier (kbar) facility
The kernel barrier (kbar) facility provides for the fast wakeup of many blocked user threads. When the barrier is signaled the operating system will use a configurable number of CPUs to quickly wake all the threads blocked on it (see the kbar(3) man page).
sgi-shield kernel module
Enables the use of the cpu_shield routine that controls timer interrupts on select CPUs
User level interrupt facility (see the uli(3) man page).
SGI Linux Trace (SLT)
For more information on SGI REACT, see REACT Real-Time Programmer's Guide.
SGI® UPC is an implementation of the Unified Parallel C (UPC) parallel extension to the C programming language standard and includes the following software packages:
sgi-upc
sgi-upc-devel
xpmem
Cross process memory mapping. See xpmem descriptions in “SGI® MPI”.
sgi-array-services
SGI Array Services includes administrator commands, libraries, daemons, and kernel extensions that support the execution of parallel applications across a number of hosts in a cluster, or array.
sgi-mpt
SGI MPT runtime environment. See “SGI® MPI”.
sgi-mpt-shmem
Contains the SGI implementation of SHEM which are shared, distributed memory access (SHMEM) routines. Also see xpmem descriptions in “SGI® MPI” on page 2
libgru
SGI Altix UV global reference unit (GRU) libraries
superpages
Note: Superpages are defined in an EFI firmware variable. At boot time the Altix UV BIOS reserves the superpages memory so that it is not memory that is available to the operating system. The UV BIOS passes superpage addresses to the superpages driver as an Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) device. The superpages module is only supported on SGI Altix UV 100 and UV 1000 series systems. numatools
SGI NUMAlink memory placement tools
libcpuset
The cpuset library provides the mechanisms needed to create, destroy and manage cpusets, and to control the placement of processes and threads within cpusets.
libbitmask
This Bitmask library supports multi-word bitmask operations for applications programmed in the C programming language. It works in conjunction with Linux kernel support for processor and memory placement on multiprocessor SMP and NUMA systems. The cpuset library depends on this bitmask library.
For more information, see these related manuals:
Unified Parallel C (UPC) User's Guide
Message Passing Toolkit (MPT) User's Guide
Linux Resource Administration Guide
SGI Altix UV GRU Development Kit Programmer's Guide
Linux Application Tuning Guide for SGI X86-64 Based Systems
SGI® Accelerate™ is used to accelerate applications with optimized software libraries and runtime performance tools and includes the following software packages:
cpusets
The cpuset facility is primarily a workload manager tool permitting a system administrator to restrict the number of processor and memory resources that a process or set of processes may use. A cpuset defines a list of CPUs and memory nodes.
numatools
See numatools description in “SGI® UPC”.
FFIO
Cpusets and NUMA tools provide controls for dedicated resource use which in turn helps optimize performance on a system shared by many users. For I/O intensive applications, FFIO helps improve performance without additional coding or re-tooling of the software logic.
sgi-pcp
SGI Performance Co-Pilot Altix UV hub performance counters
libgru development kit
SGI Altix UV Global Reference Unit (GRU), part of the SGI Altix UV Hub application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), Library development Kit.
SGISOLVE
The PSLDLT libraries under the SGISOLVE umbrella contain two direct solvers, PSLDLT and PSLDU, and one iterative solver, DIterative (deprecated), for solving symmetric, general unsymmetric, double precision, double complex, 32bit and 64bit integer, sparse linear systems of equations. These solvers are optimized and parallelized for both IN-CORE and OUT-OF-CORE execution on the SGI SMP platforms.
For more information, see these related manuals:
Linux Resource Administration Guide
SGI Altix UV GRU Development Kit Programmer's Guide
Performance Co-Pilot Linux User's and Administrator's Guide
Linux Application Tuning Guide for SGI X86-64 Based Systems
SGI Performance Suite contains software packages released under a variety of licenses. The licensing terms for all proprietary software packages allow users to install the software only on SGI systems. See the PACKAGE_LICENSES.txt file that is available in the /docs directory of the appropriate CD media for more details.
The following CDs ship with the SGI Performance Suite 1.2 release:
SGI® MPI CD
SGI® REACT® CD
SGI® UPC CD
SGI® Accelerate™ CD
Note: You only receive the CDs associated with the software bundles you have ordered. If you have ordered the entire SGI Peformance Suite, then you will receive all four CDs.
For a complete list of RPMs included in the SGI Performance Suite 1.2 release, see the file called RPMS.txt that is available in the /docs directory on the CD media for each product.
For the latest information about software and documentation in this release, see the release notes that are in a file with the product name and -readme.txt suffix that is available in /docs directory on the CD media for each product.
This section describes how to get software updates for your system and covers these topics:
Detailed instructions for downloading and installing updates are available from the SGI product pages on Supportfolio: https://support.sgi.com/ .
| Note: You must have a Supportfolio account to access this page and the SGI update server. |
SLES 11 SP1 customers are encouraged to use the YaST Online Update tool to keep the software on their systems updated with the latest maintenance fixes.
Software updates for SLES 11 SP1 are provided by Novell. In order to configure your system to enable online updates, you must register with Novell. For more help with this, you can use the Novell Customer Center Configuration tool. The Novell Customer Center Configuration module has been moved from the Software to the Support menu in YaST.
Software updates for RHEL 6 are provided by Red Hat. As a Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer, you receive access to the Red Hat Network. This allows you to download updates for your system. For more information on the Red Hat Network and getting updates, see Red Hat Network Overview and the Update link at https://www.redhat.com/rhn/ .
You can also use the yum software package manager to get updates, as follows:
% yum update |
The yum software package manager checks for updates and then updates your system appropriately. You must be registered with RHN, for yum to get RHN RHEL 6 updates.
You can also use the Package Update (pup), which is a graphical tool for locating and installing updates, as follows:
% pup
You can configure the updatesd(8) notifier daemon to notify you of updates and potentially install the updates for you. Configuration is done via the yum-updatesd.conf(5) file.
Customers that received SGI Performance Suite software pre-installed on their new SGI system may run one of the following commands as root user to add the proper update source. Each product has a unique command.
For SGI MPI run:
% /usr/sbin/sgi-mpi-update-source |
For SGI REACT run:
% /usr/sbin/sgi-react-update-source |
For SGI UPC, run:
% /usr/sbin/sgi-upc-update-source |
For SGI Accelerate run:
% /usr/sbin/sgi-accelerate-update-source |
Each script will prompt you for your Supportfolio login and then add the proper SGI update source for the given architecture. These commands only apply to systems running RHEL 6 as the base operating system.
For information on where and how to get updates, see the release notes that are in a file with the product name and -readme.txt suffix that is available in /docs directory on the CD media for each product.
| Note: See the SGI Foundation Software 2.4 Start Here for detailed information on SGI Foundation Software 2.4 release. This section has been included here for your convenience. |
Customers that received SGI Foundation Software 2.4 pre-installed on their new SGI system may run the following command as root user to add the proper update source for SGI Foundation Software 2.4:
$ /usr/sbin/sgi-foundation-update-source |
This script will prompt you for your Supportfolio login and then add the proper SGI update source for the given architecture.
For additional information on how to configure YaST Online Update to download updates for SGI Foundation 2.4 login to Supportfolio at http://support.sgi.com . Click on the Browse Collections link on the left. Click on SGI Performance Suite “SGI Performance Suite patch downloads and descriptions” on the right. Click on Supported Major Releases / Service Packs. Click on SGI® Foundation Software 2.4 on the right. The SGI® Foundation Software 2.4 page appears.
SGI maintains the following website for open source information that describes projects related to its open source efforts:
You can also access open source information (such as Open SpeedShop) from the following website:
The following manuals have been updated for this release:
SGI Altix UV System Management Node Administrator's Guide, 007-5694-005
Updated Figure 1-6, “SMN Ethernet Cabling Layout for a Single Altix UV Rack”.
Added a note about node BMC and BaseIO BMC firmware versions in "Enabling a Remote Console" in Chapter 3.
Corrected information about BaseIO BMC firmware in "Determining the IP Address of the BaseIO BMC" in Chapter 3.
Message Passing Toolkit (MPT) User's Guide, 007-3773-017
Updated information in "Configuring Array Services" in Chapter 2.