Affinity logical partitioning

Some POWER® processor-based platform systems have the ability to create affinity logical partitions. This feature automatically determines which system CPU and memory resources are to be used for each partition, based on their relative physical location to each other.

The Hardware Management Console, HMC, divides the system into symmetrical LPARs with 4-processor or 8-processor partitions, depending on the selection of the administrator in the setup process. The processors and memory are aligned on MCM boundaries. This is designed to allow the system to be used as a set of identical cluster nodes and provides performance optimization for scientific and technical workloads. If the system is booted in this mode, the ability to tune resources by adding and deleting CPUs and memory is not available. There is a performance gain in workloads running in an affinity logical partition over a normal logical partition.