When running the SPECint_rate gcc on some very large boxes it was noticed
that the system was spending lots of time in mpol_shared_policy_lookup.
The gamess benchmark can also show it and is what I mostly used to chase
down the issue since the setup for that I found a easier.
To be clear the binaries were on tmpfs because of disk I/O reqruirements.
We then used text replication to avoid icache misses and having all the
copies banging on the memory where the instruction code resides.
This results in us hitting a bottle neck in mpol_shared_policy_lookup
since lookup is serialised by the shared_policy lock.
I have only reproduced this on very large (3k+ cores) boxes. The problem
starts showing up at just a few hundred ranks getting worse until it
threatens to livelock once it gets large enough.
For example on the gamess benchmark at 128 ranks this area consumes only
~1% of time, at 512 ranks it consumes nearly 13%, and at 2k ranks it is
over 90%.
To alleviate the contention on this area I converted the spinslock to a
rwlock. This allows the large number of lookups to happen simultaneously.
The results were quite good reducing this to consumtion at max ranks to
around 2%.
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>