Most CPU mother boards with multiple sockets employ the so-called "NUMA" architecture.

Houdini Pro detects the NUMA configuration at start-up and will adapt its memory management and thread interaction based on the different NUMA nodes that are available.

 

NUMA (checkbox)

Enable or disable the NUMA-awareness. (Enabled by default)

When NUMA is enabled, Houdini will organize memory and threads to take into account the NUMA configuration of the hardware. This can significantly enhance the scaling of the engine beyond 6 cores.

Combined with Large Pages the speed gain can be up to 25% depending on the number of cores, the motherboard and CPU brand.

See the Houdini Pro topic for some real performance data obtained on a 40-core dual Xeon box.

 

NUMA Offset

Default 0, min 0, max 15.

The NUMA offset is useful if you're running multiple instances of Houdini, in which case you should assign a different NUMA node for each running Houdini process to avoid the Houdini instances competing for the same resources.

For example, on a 16-core hardware with 4 NUMA nodes, you could be running four Houdini processes each using 4 cores. By setting Numa Offset to 0, 1, 2 and 3, each Houdini instance will be running on its own NUMA node without conflicting with the other Houdini instances.