POWER7 and POWER7+ Optimization and Tuning Guide

An IBM Redbooks publication

Published 23 November 2012, updated 04 March 2013

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ISBN-10: 0738437530
ISBN-13: 9780738437538
IBM Form #: SG24-8079-00
(224 pages)

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Authors: Brian Hall, Mala Anand, Bill Buros, Miso Cilimdzic, Hong Hua, Judy Liu, John MacMillan, Sudhir Maddali, K Madhusudanan, Bruce Mealey, Steve Munroe, Francis P O’Connell, Sergio Reyes, Raul Silvera, Randy Swanberg, Brian Twichell, Brian F Veale, Julian Wang, Yaakov Yaari

Abstract

This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides advice and technical information about optimizing and tuning application code to run on systems that are based on the IBM POWER7® and POWER7+™ processors. This advice is drawn from application optimization efforts across many different types of code that runs under the IBM AIX® and Linux operating systems, focusing on the more pervasive performance opportunities that are identified, and how to capitalize on them. The technical information was developed by a set of domain experts at IBM.

The focus of this book is to gather the right technical information, and lay out simple guidance for optimizing code performance on the IBM POWER7 and POWER7+ systems that run the AIX or Linux operating systems. This book contains a large amount of straightforward performance optimization that can be performed with minimal effort and without previous experience or in-depth knowledge. This optimization work can:


  • Improve the performance of the application that is being optimized for the POWER7 system
  • Carry over improvements to systems that are based on related processor chips
  • Improve performance on other platforms


The audience of this book is those personnel who are responsible for performing migration and implementation activities on IBM POWER7-based servers, which includes system administrators, system architects, network administrators, information architects, and database administrators (DBAs).

Table of contents

Chapter 1. Optimization and tuning on IBM POWER7 and IBM POWER7+
Chapter 2. The POWER7 processor
Chapter 3. The POWER Hypervisor
Chapter 4. AIX
Chapter 5. Linux
Chapter 6. Compilers and optimization tools for C, C++, and Fortran
Chapter 7. Java
Chapter 8. DB2
Chapter 9. WebSphere
Application Server
Appendix A. Analyzing malloc usage under AIX
Appendix B. Performance tooling and empirical performance analysis
Appendix C. POWER7 optimization and tuning with third-party applications

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