How to determine which logical cores share the same physical core?

Question

I am working on a tool to allow students to self-evaluate their programming assignment's performance. In particular, the program they're writing is multi-threaded and I have no direct way of influencing the number of threads created. I would like to compare the performance of their programs given a different number of cores (and ideally, their programs should speed up roughly proportionally to how many cores it is allowed to use).

We can pass a bitmask to Process.SetAffinity to control which cores the program uses.

This is problematic on i5 and i7 machines that use hyper-threading and split each physical core in to two logical ones. I want the program to run on two/four distinct physical cores. On my i7 machine, a process with affinity set to 3 (cores 0&1) will run roughly as fast as the program on a single core (indicating these logical cores share the same physical core), but with affinity set to 5 (cores 0&3) it will run much faster (indicating these cores are using different physical cores). However, I haven't found a reliable way (other than trial-and-error) to determine this.

How can I (without experimentation) determine which logical cores share the same physical core?

(/proc/cpuinfo has the information I need but that is not available on Windows machines.)

Answer 1

Based on comments to your question (thanks to all, especially to @RLH) I made this class for you:

/// <summary>
/// Provides CPU information
/// </summary>
public static class Processor
{
    private static IHardwareCore[] cores;
    private static int[] logicalCores;

    /// <summary>
    /// Hardware core
    /// </summary>
    public interface IHardwareCore 
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Logical core IDs
        /// </summary>
        int[] LogicalCores { get; }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Hardware cores
    /// </summary>
    public static IHardwareCore[] HardwareCores
    {
        get
        {
            return cores ?? (cores = GetLogicalProcessorInformation()
                .Where(x => x.Relationship == LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_RELATIONSHIP.RelationProcessorCore)
                .Select(x => new HardwareCore((UInt64)x.ProcessorMask))
                .ToArray<IHardwareCore>());
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// All logical core IDs
    /// </summary>
    public static int[] LogicalCores
    {
        get
        {
            return logicalCores ?? (logicalCores = HardwareCores
                .SelectMany(x => x.LogicalCores)
                .ToArray());
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Current logical core ID
    /// </summary>
    public static int CurrentLogicalCore
    {
        get { return GetCurrentProcessorNumber(); }
    }

    private class HardwareCore : IHardwareCore
    {
        public HardwareCore(UInt64 logicalCoresMask)
        {
            var logicalCores = new List<int>();

            for (var i = 0; i < 64; ++i)
            {
                if (((logicalCoresMask >> i) & 0x1) == 0) continue;
                logicalCores.Add(i);
            }

            LogicalCores = logicalCores.ToArray();
        }

        public int[] LogicalCores { get; private set; }
    }

    #region Exports

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    private struct PROCESSORCORE
    {
        public byte Flags;
    };

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    private struct NUMANODE
    {
        public uint NodeNumber;
    }

    private enum PROCESSOR_CACHE_TYPE
    {
        CacheUnified,
        CacheInstruction,
        CacheData,
        CacheTrace
    }

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    private struct CACHE_DESCRIPTOR
    {
        public byte Level;
        public byte Associativity;
        public ushort LineSize;
        public uint Size;
        public PROCESSOR_CACHE_TYPE Type;
    }

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit)]
    private struct SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION_UNION
    {
        [FieldOffset(0)]
        public PROCESSORCORE ProcessorCore;
        [FieldOffset(0)]
        public NUMANODE NumaNode;
        [FieldOffset(0)]
        public CACHE_DESCRIPTOR Cache;
        [FieldOffset(0)]
        private UInt64 Reserved1;
        [FieldOffset(8)]
        private UInt64 Reserved2;
    }

    private enum LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_RELATIONSHIP
    {
        RelationProcessorCore,
        RelationNumaNode,
        RelationCache,
        RelationProcessorPackage,
        RelationGroup,
        RelationAll = 0xffff
    }

    private struct SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION
    {
        public UIntPtr ProcessorMask;
        public LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_RELATIONSHIP Relationship;
        public SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION_UNION ProcessorInformation;
    }

    [DllImport(@"kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    private static extern bool GetLogicalProcessorInformation(
        IntPtr Buffer,
        ref uint ReturnLength
    );

    private const int ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER = 122;

    private static SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION[] GetLogicalProcessorInformation()
    {
        uint ReturnLength = 0;
        GetLogicalProcessorInformation(IntPtr.Zero, ref ReturnLength);
        if (Marshal.GetLastWin32Error() == ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER)
        {
            IntPtr Ptr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal((int)ReturnLength);
            try
            {
                if (GetLogicalProcessorInformation(Ptr, ref ReturnLength))
                {
                    int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION));
                    int len = (int)ReturnLength / size;
                    SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION[] Buffer = new SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION[len];
                    IntPtr Item = Ptr;
                    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
                    {
                        Buffer[i] = (SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION)Marshal.PtrToStructure(Item, typeof(SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION));
                        Item += size;
                    }
                    return Buffer;
                }
            }
            finally
            {
                Marshal.FreeHGlobal(Ptr);
            }
        }
        return null;
    }

    [DllImport(@"kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    private static extern int GetCurrentProcessorNumber();

    #endregion
}

Usage example:

for (var i = 0; i < Processor.HardwareCores.Length; ++i)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hardware Core {0} has logical cores {1}", i,
        string.Join(", ", Processor.HardwareCores[i].LogicalCores));
}
Console.WriteLine("All logical cores: " + string.Join(", ", Processor.LogicalCores));
Console.WriteLine("Current Logical Core is " + Processor.CurrentLogicalCore);

Example outputs for Intel Core i5:

Hardware Core 0 has logical cores 0, 1
Hardware Core 1 has logical cores 2, 3
All logical cores: 0, 1, 2, 3
Current Logical Core is 2