Smart-1 700/7000 SMT & CPU

[Timothy_Hall]

Can someone with access to one of the new Smart-1 700s and/or 7000s please run the following commands from expert mode and post the output? 

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/active

cat /proc/cpuinfo

I'm curious to see the CPU type and whether SMT/Hyperthreading is enabled.  The general advice for SMSs is to leave SMT disabled as it causes around an 11% performance penalty, at least for R81.20, according to sk104788 (which no longer exists).  I'm curious to see the default SMT setting for these new models, which will presumably be running R82.  Thanks!

[the_rock]

First one shows 1 and there you go for 2nd one:

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 142
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J4105 @ 1.50GHz
stepping : 10
microcode : 0x32
cpu MHz : 1500.000
cache size : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 22
wp : yes

Andy

[Timothy_Hall]

I assume that is a 700?

[the_rock]

Yep. I dont have 7000 to check, sorry.

[the_rock]

I just texted customer that has 7000 and they said output is 1 and there are 10 cpu cores, hyperthreading enabled. 

Andy

[Timothy_Hall]

Great, thanks!

[the_rock]

Glad we can help.

[John-Haynes · Accepted solution]

A 7000 series is 56-core (2x 28-core) with no SMT enabled.

[the_rock]

Fair enough...its possible they may had texted me wrong info then, thanks for confirming @John-Haynes 

[Chris_Atkinson]

Note there are three different 7000 series models and the Quantum gateway.

Source: https://www.checkpoint.com/resources/items/datasheet-quantum-smart-1-7th-generation 

[the_rock]

Ah, okay, so maybe was correct, just a different model.

Andy

[John-Haynes]

For clarification:

Platform: 7X-20-00
Model: Smart-1 7000-UL - 56-cores (2x 28-core) with no SMT enabled

Listed specs from the UC:

700S - 4-core

700M - 14 Core

70000L - 24-core

7000XL - 48-core

7000UL - 56-core

[Timothy_Hall]

Thanks, my goal here is to determine if SMT/Hyperthreading is currently recommended for SMSs, and I thought determining the SMT status on the latest Smart-1 appliances would help. At one point, it was not recommended due to the presence of many single-threaded processes (like fwm) on an SMS handling numerous tasks.  (Hyperthreading Best Practice Recommendation For Management / SmartEvent Open Servers?)  This type of workload does not benefit from SMT and would take an approximate 11% penalty with SMT. Apparently, there was also a bottleneck in the storage controller driver and/or file system type (ext3 vs XFS) that SMT would exacerbate.

However, it appears from these 700/7000 findings that SMT is enabled below a certain number of total cores and disabled at some higher number of total cores.

It also appears that more management processes have been multi-threaded in R82, and the storage controller drivers, along with the kernel were updated to 4.18 in R82.  So I'm wondering if this recommendation still holds for R82, which is recommended now.  Tagging @BenMorris and @Tomer_Noy for an update.