Workload Profiles and performance options

Workload Profiles is one of the HPE Intelligent System Tuning (IST) features and allows you to tune the resources in your HPE ProLiant server by choosing a preconfigured workload profile. The server will automatically configure the BIOS settings to match the selected workload.

System provided Workload Profiles

The system provides these Workload Profiles:

General Power Efficient Compute

This profile is the default profile for most ProLiant servers and HPE Synergy compute modules.

This profile applies the most common performance settings that benefit most application workloads while also enabling power management settings that have minimal impact to overall performance. The settings that are applied heavily favor a balanced approach between general application performances versus power efficiency.

This profile is recommended for customers that do not typically tune their BIOS for their workload.

General Peak Frequency Compute

This profile is intended for workloads that generally benefit from processors or memory that must achieve the maximum frequency possible, for any individual core, at any time. Power management settings are applied when they ensure that any component frequency upside can be readily achieved. Processing speed is favored over any latencies that might occur. This profile is a general-purpose profile, so optimizations are done generically to increase processor core and memory speed.

This profile benefits workloads that typically benefit from faster compute time.

General Throughput Compute

This profile is intended to be used for workloads where the total maximum sustained workload throughput is needed. Increased throughput does not always occur when the processor runs at the highest individual core speed. Increased throughput can occur when the processor is able to perform sustained work across all available cores during maximum utilization. Power management settings are disabled when they are known to have impact on maximum achievable bandwidth.

Best throughput is achieved when the workload is also (Nonuniformed Memory Access) NUMA aware and optimized so settings that benefit NUMA awareness are applied.

Virtualization - Power Efficient

This profile is intended to be used for virtualization environments. The profile ensures that all available virtualization options are enabled. Certain virtualization technologies can have possible performance impacts to nonvirtualized environments and can be disabled in other profiles. Power management settings can have an impact on performance when running virtualization operating systems and this profile applies power management settings that are virtualization friendly.

Virtualization - Max Performance

This profile is intended to be used for virtualization environments. The profile ensures that all available virtualization options are enabled. Power management settings are disabled in favor of delivering maximum performance.

Low Latency

This profile is intended to be used by customers who desire the least amount of computational latency for their workloads. This profile follows the most common best practices that are documented in the HPE Low Latency Whitepaper. Maximum speed and throughput are often sacrificed to lower overall computational latency. Power management and other management features that might introduce computational latency are also disabled.

The profile benefits customers running Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) or other transactional latency sensitive workloads.

Mission Critical

This profile is intended to be used by customers who trade off performance for server reliability above the basic server defaults. The profile enables advanced memory reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features that are known to have more than a measurable impact to computational performance. Enabling this profile will have an impact to maximum memory bandwidth and will increase memory latency.

Transactional Application Processing

This profile is intended to be used for business processing environments, such as online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that require a database back-end. For example, workloads typically comprised of a high number of user-based, transactional applications running on a single server with cohosted database component. The profile balances the requirement of managing both peak frequency and throughput.

High Performance Compute (HPC)

This profile is intended for customers running in a traditional HPC environment. Typically, these environments are clustered environments where each node performs at maximum utilization for extended periods of time to solve large-scale scientific and engineering workloads. The default for our Apollo series servers, power management is typically disabled in favor of sustained available bandwidth and processor compute capacity. This profile is similar to the Low Latency profile except that some latency is accepted to achieve maximum throughput.

Decision Support

This profile is intended for Enterprise Business Database (Business Intelligence) workloads that are focused on operating and/or accessing data warehouses, such as data mining or online analytical processing (OLAP).

Graphic Processing

This profile is intended for workloads that are run on server configurations which utilize Graphics Processing Units (GPUs.) GPUs typically depend on maximum bandwidth between I/O and Memory. Power management features that have impact on the links between I/O and memory are disabled. Peer to Peer traffic is also critical and therefore virtualization is also disabled.

I/O Throughput

This profile is intended to be used for configurations that depend on maximum throughput between I/O and memory. Processor utilization driven power management features that have performance impact to the links between I/O and memory are disabled.

Custom

This option on the Workload Profiles menu disables Workload Profiles. Use this option if you want to set specific BIOS options for your deployment manually. When you select Custom, all the settings for the previously selected profile are carried forward. You can edit all or some of the options.

Custom is not a profile and settings that you specify are not saved as a template.

Default profiles for servers

Workload Profile options support a variety of power and performance requirements. For most HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers and HPE Synergy compute modules, Workload Profile is set to General Power Efficient Compute by default. This Workload Profile provides common performance and power settings suitable for most application workloads. For ProLiant XL servers in an HPE Apollo system, the Workload Profile is set to High Performance Compute by default.

Selecting a Workload Profile other than the Custom profile affects other setting options. For example, selecting the General Peak Frequency Compute profile automatically sets Power Regulator mode to Static High Performance. This setting cannot be changed and is grayed out.