An affinity mask is a
bit mask indicating what
processor(s) a
thread
Thread may refer to:
Objects
* Thread (yarn), a kind of thin yarn used for sewing
** Thread (unit of measurement), a cotton yarn measure
* Screw thread, a helical ridge on a cylindrical fastener
Arts and entertainment
* ''Thread'' (film), 2016 ...
or
process should be run on by the
scheduler of an
operating system. Setting the affinity mask for certain processes running under Windows can be useful as there are several system processes (especially on domain controllers) that are restricted to the first CPU / Core. So, excluding the first CPU might lead to better application performance.
Windows API
Thread affinity in
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
can be specified with the ''SetThreadAffinityMask'' function. Forcing of each
OpenMP thread to distinctive cores in Windows can be accomplished by means of the following
C code:
#include
#include
// Set OpenMP thread affinity
void set_thread_affinity ()
See also
*
Processor affinity
References
External links
MSDN article on SetThreadAffinityMask functionCPU Balancer, a free, open-source utility that distributes Windows XP processes uniformly over logical processors using the affinity mask
Job scheduling
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