Installing and Managing HP-UX Virtual Partitions (A.02.01)

Managing Virtual Partitions
CPU Allocation
Chapter 3 49
If your applications are CPU intensive (and not I/O intensive), use
unbound CPUs so that you can easily adjust the number of CPUs via
dynamic CPU migration as the demand on the virtual partition changes.
Unbound CPUs provide greater flexibility of movement between virtual
partitions because they can be added and removed without needing to
bring down the affected partitions.
Determining When to Specify a Hardware Path for a
Bound CPU
By default, the vPars monitor chooses the hardware path of a bound
CPU. However, if you need to use a specific processor, you can specify its
hardware path in the vPars commands.
Generally, you do not need to specify a hardware path. The main purpose
of specifying hardware paths is when you need to consider NUMA
(Non-Uniform Memory Access) factors, where the distance between a
CPU and memory is critical to performance. The rp5470/L3000 and
rp7400/N4000 servers do not have NUMA architectures, so there is
usually no need to specify CPU hardware paths with these servers.
Although the Superdome has a NUMA architecture, the HP-UX OS does
not yet support the NUMA features.