Dell PowerEdge 1655MC - Manual (Page 14)

Optimal BIOS settings for HPC with Dell PowerEdge 12 th generation servers
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 C States, C1E, Monitor/Mwait – Disabled. This is to turn off all power saving features on the
processor.
 System Profile – Max Performance. This ensures there is no system level power saving.
 Logical Processor – Disabled. This is especially needed when Monitor/Mwait is Disabled
A separate study has covered this topic in great depth. Refer to this link for details. 10
4. Test bed and applications
The goal of this paper is to quantify the impact of the different BIOS options available on Dell
PowerEdge 12
th generation servers. While Section 3 described what each tuning parameter
accomplishes, this section seeks to quantify each option and determine the actual performance at the
cluster level. Several of the BIOS options studied here increase system performance with a
corresponding increase in power consumption. To evaluate accurately the performance and power
trade-offs, the performance results presented in this study are complemented with power
measurements.
A 16-server cluster was used in the Dell HPC Engineering lab. All results presented in this paper were
derived from this test bed. This section describes the test bed and the applications that were
evaluated as part of this study. Table 4 provides details of the test environment and Table 5 contains
information on the applications and benchmarks used.
Table 4. Test bed details
Component Description
SERVER Dell PowerEdge R620 rack server (1)
Dell PowerEdge M620 blade server (16) in a PowerEdge M1000e chassis
SERVER BIOS 1.1.2
SERVER iDRAC 1.06.06 (Build 15)
PROCESSORS Dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 @ 2.8 GHz
MEMORY 8*8GB 1600 MT/s RDIMMs
STORAGE 146GB 15K SAS PERC H310
INTERCONNECT Mellanox InfiniBand ConnectX-3 FDR HCAs
INFINIBAND SWITCH Mellanox M4001F FDR blade chassis I/O switch module
SOFTWARE Rocks+ 6.0.1 Dell edition
OPERATING SYSTEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 x86_64
INFINIBAND DRIVER Mellanox OFED 1.5.3-3.0.0