Heterogeneous/Hybrid computing on CPUs and GPUs

Thread Pinning/Affinity

Thread pinning is very important in order to get feasible and reliable results on todays multi and manycore architectures. Otherwise threads will migrate from one core to another, causing the waste of clock cycles. Even more important, if you placed your memory correctly by first touch on ccNUMA systems, e.g. SGI Altix or every dual socket Intel XEON Core i7, the thread accessing the memory has to go over the QPI interface connecting the two sockets to access the memory if it is migrated to another socket.

Jan Treibig developed a tool for that called likwid-pin.

A sample usage would be as follows:

likwid-pin -s 0 -c"0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7" ./Exec

This would pin 8 Threads of the executable of the cores 0 to 8.
For information about the topology, just use the other tool, called likwid-topology which gives you cache and core hierarchy.
The skipmask is important and thread implementation specific. Also consider, that in hybrid programs, e.g. OpenMP and MPI, multiple shepard threads are present.