[Beowulf] Optimal BIOS settings for Tyan K8SRE

Bruce Allen ballen at gravity.phys.uwm.edu
Sun Sep 3 15:10:35 PDT 2006


Stephen,

Search the archives of this list to find some advice from me and others 
about setting the ECC features.

Cheers,
 	Bruce


On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, stephen mulcahy wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm maintaining a 20-node cluster of Tyan K8SREs (4GB RAM, dual Opteron
> 270s) which are being used primarily for Oceanographic modelling (MPICH2
> running on Debian/Linux 2.6 kernel).
>
> I had to make some tweaks to make all 4GB of RAM visible to the OS.
>
> I'm now at the point where I'm considering a pass at performance tuning
> the system. Before I start on OS level tuning, I'm trying to figure out
> whether there are any performance improvements to be had from tweaking
> BIOS settings, particularly those relating to Memory and ECC. I have a
> reasonable conceptual understanding of what the various settings are doing
> (and have glanced at the AMD BIOS developers guide for reference) but I am
> very unclear on what the potential performance impact of any of these
> settings are. Does anyone have any general advice or pointers to good
> reference information on this?
>
> My current settings are,
>
> Hammer Configuration
> 	HT-LDT Frequency	Auto
> 	Dual-Core Enable	Enabled
> 	ECC Features
> 		ECC	Enabled
> 		ECC Scrub Redirection	Enabled
> 		Dram ECC Scrub CTL	Disabled
> 		Chip-Kill	Disabled
> 		DCACHE ECC Scrub CTL	Disabled
> 		L2 ECC Scrub CTL	Disabled
>
> 	Memory Hole
> 		4GB Memory Hole Adjust	Manual
> 		4GB Memory Hole Size	768 MB
> 		IOMMU	Enabled
> 		Size	32 MB
> 		Memhole mapping	Hardware
>
> 	Memory Config
> 		Swizzle Memory Banks	Enabled
> 		DDR clock jitter	Disabled
> 		DDR Data Transfer Rate	Auto
> 		Enable all memory clocks	Populated
> 		Controller config mode	Auto
> 		Timing config mode	Auto
> 	AMD PowerNow!	Disabled
> 	Node Memory Interleave	Auto
> 	Dram Bank Interleave	Auto
> 	GART Error Reporting	Disabled
> 	MTRR Mapping	Discrete
>
>
> Any comments on those welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -stephen
>
>
>



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