Does gcc, icc, or Microsoft's C/C++ compiler support or know anything about NUMA?

Question

If I have a multi-processor board that has cache-coherent non-uniform memory access ( NUMA ), i.e. separate \"northbridges\" with separate RAM for each processor, does any compi

Answer 1

Linux kernel knows about NUMA and will try to give your process pages from memory local to the current CPU (source: U. Drepper, "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory".)

Answer 2

For MS platforms, the compiler is not aware of NUMA. However, the system is NUMA aware and will attempt to allocate memory in the same node.

See http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/64plusLP for some more details on how recent versions of Windows handle NUMA.

Answer 3

NUMA-aware memory allocation is not done at compile time. Making assumptions like this would be bad for portability.

On Linux, this is a kernel function, though you can control this at runtime with numactl or set_mempolicy or with libnuma.