LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ELC-E Europe 2014

In NUMA systems, each CPU has its own bank of memory, resulting in fast access to local memory, and slower access to memory elsewhere in the system. Recently a mechanism has been implemented in the Linux kernel to automatically run programs near their memory, and to move memory to near the programs using it. This presentation explains why computers are built this way, why NUMA locality matters, how the automatic NUMA balancing kernel code works, what it can do, and what kind of performance improvements have been observed. This presentation is also a good opportunity to discuss recent and future developments for the automatic NUMA balancing code.