This workshop addresses the basic rules, tools, metrics, and guidelines that can significantly improve the efficiency of your SGI Origin family system.

The performance evaluation and tuning guidelines include IRIX® observations, common UNIX® knowledge, and general methodologies and tactics regarding IRIX 6.5. The workshop uses primarily IRIX standard-release tools. (When appropriate, other tools are displayed to show alternative approaches to obtain the desired data.) This workshop is slanted toward a compute-oriented workload on a large-configuration Origin family system.

Topics Covered

• What is tuning?
• Steps in the tuning process
• Common tuning objectives
• System configuration
• Software configuration
• Building a kernel
• Instrumenting the system
• Applications
• Multithreading
• CPU scheduling
• Filesystem buffer cache
• Memory scheduling
• Page migration

Upon completion of this course, the student should be able to:

• Describe how to approach a system analysis
• List the SARand accounting data that is available
• Describe what accounting data is available
• Decide what performance metrics are of interest
• Identify common tuning objectives and solutions
• Resolve user and application issues
• Resolve filesystem and I/O issues
• Resolve memory and CPU issues
• Control workloads by using the Network Queuing Environment (NQE)

Advanced system administrators who have knowledge of IRIX functionality and have six months' experience with the IRIX operating system.

Prerequisites

Students should have completed the following SGI courses:

• IRIX System Administration I
• IRIX System Administration II
• IRIX Advanced System Administration

Class Hours

Course hours vary depending on the training center you select. The course dates and times will be included in the confirmation notice you receive from SGI after you register. Typically, classes start at 9:00 a.m.