Intel Xeon Gold/Platinum - why not whitelisted for 4 socket server?

[Anonymous]

Hi!

We just received the latest Qlik CPU Whitelist dated from August, 14th 2018!

Finally the Intel Xeon Platinum made it on the list! Thanks for that!

However both the Intel Xeon Gold (theoretically a 4 socket server) and the Intel Xeon Platinum (theoretially a 8 socket server) are only whitelisted to run on a 2 socket server!

Is there a technical reason for this limitation?

We see a 2 socket server with Intel Xeon E5 v4 to be saturated by a complex Qlik Dashboard (> 50 objects on a single page). To provide better response times, we want to have more CPU-Cores available.

The only 4 socket systems that are currently whitelisted are Intel Xeon E7 v4 systems, which were released back in 2016. We are wondering if we can go for a 4 socket Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 System.

Thx,

Roland

[Frederic_De_Ranter]

Hi Roland,

The recommended server document lists the processors and architectures we have tested and validated that they perform equal or better than expectations when tested with the HW BM package. At this moment we have not yet tested a final version of a 4-socket server, thus the reason they are not listed as recommended HW.

Since every application and use-case will give different results, I would recommend you to check with your HW vendor if you can test a 4-socket platinum server with your application and use the Qlik Sense Scalability Tools or QV Scalability Tools to generate a normal work-load and compare this with the current HW you have.
Regards,

Frederic

[Anonymous]

Hi Frederic!

Thanks for the feedback.

Same for us, it's not so easy to get hands on a 4 CPU Gold/Platinum Server 😞

One idea is to use a  Amazon C5 Instance for some testing. They seem to run some Intel Gold/Platinum CPU,  unfortunately Amazon does not state exactly which CPU type is used. Amazon AWS EC2 C5 Instances with Custom Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs

From the specs would you expect Intel Xeon Platinum 4 CPUs to outperform the Xeon E7 4 CPU servers?

I remember back in the late 2000/early 2010 there was once a 4-way CPU type that performed really badly with QlikView, as the "memory to cpu mapping" was not good for Qlik. That's why I'm asking. Typically we run 2-way Xeon E5 systems, but in this case we would expect that our Qlik Dashboard would benefit from a 4-way system.

Thx,

Roland

[Frederic_De_Ranter · Accepted solution]

Hi Roland,

I can't find if Amazon is using 2- or 4-socket systems for their c5-instances. But since the maximum vCPU count is 72, I assume it is a 2-socket system with an unknown 18 cores CPU. Strange enough they do not mention which CPU, while they do mention they use the (unlisted on ARK.intel.com) Platinum 8175 for their M5 instance.

If comparing over generations, the new Xeon Scalable family is indeed outperforming the Xeon v4 family. And this will be also the case with 4-socket configurations due to the higher BW of the QPI links and better architecture in the CPUs. If I can choose a 4-socket system to test, I would choose a system with 4 x Gold 6154 CPU's, since they give the highest base clock speed (3GHz) while having a nice amount of physical cores (72).

If your dashboard will benefit from a 4-socket system, I can't say. One suggestion of how to get an indication if it is the core count that is the bottleneck, would be to run the Qlik Scalability tools and see from the performance monitors and task manager how the CPU is used when different amount of users are using the app. If there are some single threaded operations (just a single core being used when looking in the task manager, performance tab and changing the view of the CPU to logical processors) on the dashboard, they will hold up further calculations and then adding cores to the system will not help but a higher clock speed will.

Indeed there are still CPU's you shouldn't be using in a 4-socket system: those that only have 2 QPI links available. For the Xeon scalable family that is the Gold 51xx series.

Best regards,

Frederic