Impact of module placement & number on memory bandwith

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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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So I have been browsing the manual of one of my boards today in an attempt to understand the potential usage of the black dimm slots on Supermicro X11 SP boards...

I wondered how badly it would impact the performance if they are used and while I have yet to hear from SM support I found this document hinting at the potential impact - and its actually quite large. Never realized that it had that much impact not to have a balanced or full config...

O/c this is in regard to Lenovo servers with 12 modules per CPU and not SM with 6/8 but it at least gives an impression for my use case - and of course makes a very good case to think more about this than I have been doing before...


Xeon E5v4: http://lenovopress.com/lp0501.pdf
Xeon SP: https://lenovopress.com/lp0742.pdf

upload_2019-6-30_12-11-58.png
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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HPE has similar info also indicating the non optimum config suffer a lot. while I have not tested it simply I only populate 6 or 12 dimms per socket.
(Exception is really small servers where really only need 1 or 2 dimms but they also don’t then need peak memory performance)

The logic behind lots of scalable systems have 8 slots is not to loose capacity compared to the older E5 systems, SM should have really found a way to get 12 dimm sockets on the boards per cpu.
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Yes that would have been great. 6 available for peak performance on a single cpu board is kind of limiting...
O/c 6 x 32GB is not too shabby, but as soon as you don't do 32GB+ modules...
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Normally I use for general purpose VM or DB workload 384gb per socket (20 cores per socket for VM, generally less for other workloads), and using only rdimm that’s 2R 32gb you need 12 slots a socket, now you get 64gb rdimms or lrdimms at a reasonable price can do that in 6.
 

cheezehead

Active Member
Sep 23, 2012
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The memory bandwidth impacts can be fairly large.

Dell has some performance numbers comparing Scalable processor memory bandwidth on their C6420 blades, I'm assuming most vendors will suffer similar deficits.

Modular system CPU and memory configurations can affect performance | Dell Canada

For SM, you may want to email support to get the answer...their email support has actually been very good from my experience.
 
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