1.2. Interconnects

It is important to examine the interconnects that occur between cores. As the number of cores in a machine rise, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to provide uniform access to the memory for all of them. Many hardware vendors now provide a transparent network of interconnects between cores and memory, known as a NUMA (non-uniform memory access) architecture. On NUMA systems, knowing the interconnect topology allows threads that communicate frequently to be placed on adjacent cores.