How do I manage CPU affinity FBO multiple instances of an application in RHEL v5.x?

Kevin McLeod · 02-05-2009, 01:41 PM

I am taking over the management and support for a workstation with 4 64-bit AMD dual core opterons with RHEL v5.x OS with all the updates. The user is complaining that when running 2 or more instances of a multi-threaded chemical process application, the same CPUs are being used instead of using other available CPUs that are idle. My task is to allocate through CPU affinity, different application instances to different CPUs. Keeping in mind I'm a novice in Linux, how do I do this? I would appreciate a step by step process due to my lack of Linux experience. Thanks!

kentyler · 02-05-2009, 02:13 PM

Make sure you have the schedutils RPM installed and try taskset

http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-1553

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/settin...r-process.html

Kevin McLeod · 02-05-2009, 05:40 PM

Thanks. I appreciate the advice. Keep in mind since I have 4 dual core processors, I have 8 CPUs to assign. And now I have the problem of determining the PID. A different PID appears every time the application is run. Is it possible to use the main executable name in lieu of a PID number? And perhaps I can copy the main application executable and rename it? That way I could do something like this to run three simultaneous instances:

taskset 0x00000004 -p App1.exe
taskset 0x00000003 -p App2.exe
taskset 0x00000006 -p App3.exe

Or is there a way to preset the PID to the application executable each time it is run?