GitLab

When running the SPECint_rate gcc on some very large boxes it was
noticed that the system was spending lots of time in
mpol_shared_policy_lookup().  The gamess benchmark can also show it and
is what I mostly used to chase down the issue since the setup for that I
found to be easier.

To be clear the binaries were on tmpfs because of disk I/O requirements.
We then used text replication to avoid icache misses and having all the
copies banging on the memory where the instruction code resides.  This
results in us hitting a bottleneck in mpol_shared_policy_lookup() since
lookup is serialised by the shared_policy lock.

I have only reproduced this on very large (3k+ cores) boxes.  The
problem starts showing up at just a few hundred ranks getting worse
until it threatens to livelock once it gets large enough.  For example
on the gamess benchmark at 128 ranks this area consumes only ~1% of
time, at 512 ranks it consumes nearly 13%, and at 2k ranks it is o...