As multi-core CPUs become increasingly popular on server-grade hardware as well as end-user desktop PCs or laptops, there have been growing efforts in the community (e.g., in terms of programming models, compiler or operating system support) towards developing applications optimized for multi-core architecture.
One operating system (OS) support often exploited to run performance-critical applications on multi-core processors is so-called "processor affinity" or "CPU pinning". This is an OS-specific feature that "binds" a running process or program to particular CPU core(s).
Binding a program to specific CPU cores can be beneficial in several scenarios. For example, when an application with highly cache-bound workload runs together with other CPU-intensive jobs, pinning the application to a specific CPU would reduce CPU cache misses. Also, when two processes communicate via shared memory intensively, scheduling both processes on the cores in the same