Chinese build the most powerful computer in the world

Cyber superstardom and the great super power race is on! 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight 93,000 trillion calculations per second. 1.31 PB of primary memory Advanced manufacturing, weather forecasting ,Life Sciences & big data analytics 10.5 million locally-made processing cores and 40,960 nodes , running on a Linux-based operating system. As a computer scientist , this must be an amazing challenge to write software which can exploit the capacity. Read a very interesting technical paper written by Jack Dongarra Related articles Find Table Scans in Query Plan Cache Memory grants and execution plans How to find CurrentClockSpeed and MaxClockSpeed using Powershell... Read more →

SQL Server 100 cpu diagnose

Question: Users are reporting long delays in query responses. I checked on the server and noticed CPU counter at 100 % on Performance Monitor. There are 4 cores associated to this server and all the cores were hovering around 100%. How can I diagnose the underlying cause ? Answer: It’s a common problem faced by DBAs , where the server is sitting at 100% for prolonged periods. Check there are no other processes outside of SQL Server which are causing the server to be at 100%. Typically security scans, virus scans and monitoring can be root causes. I have also... Read more →

How can I tell if hyperthreading is on Windows 2012

Question: One of the prerequisites of an application install is to have SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Installed .There are also some OS based prerequisites. One of these is to have hyperthreading turned off. I’ve spoken to the server engineers who’ve confirmed hyperthreading is turned off from the BIOS. How can I check from the OS if hyperthreading is turned off? When I check in the SQL Server Error Logs there is an entry at SQL Server start up which although gives some information doesn't fully answer my question : SQL Server detected 1 sockets with 14 cores per socket and... Read more →

Powershell script: Powershell equivalent of Linux top

One thing I like about Linux is the top command. The linux top command displays in a continious stream cpu movements. This real-time display is very useful when you're trying to identify any unusual patterns in cpu, or trying to identify the highest user. I started thinking about you would have a similar structure using powershell. Getting the cpu information is straightforward. Get-Process or ps will display the information with the headers: Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName Thats's easy. But to view any movements I need to continiously hit the refresh button. There are better things to... Read more →

SQL Server RUNNABLE – SUSPENDED – RUNNING status model

Question: When I’m viewing activity on SQL Server , for example, sp_who2 – the status column displays different states – RUNNABLE – SUSPENDED – RUNNING. Could you explain the difference? Answer: Some background information on the SQL Schedulers , will make understanding the RUNNABLE – SUSPENDED – RUNNING model clearer. Schedulers are made up of three parts . A thread cycles though these three parts 1) Processor 2) Waiter list – threads waiting for resources. Use Sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks to view resource waits for the resources 3) Runnable – thread has all the resources and waiting for the processor. Explore runnable status... Read more →