Forcing NUMA Node affinity for Analysis Services Tabular databases

In the whitepaper, Hardware Sizing a Tabular Solution, we made a reference to Analysis Services Tabular and Non Uniform Memory Access or NUMA. Specifically, Analysis Services Tabular mode is not NUMA Aware. SSAS Tabular mode runs in memory and will load any tabular models into memory on startup. Having the model loaded into memory is what gives SSAS tabular models such impressive query performance. With that said, there are cases where hardware can limit the speed of SSAS Tabular. More specifically, if your Tabular model is running on a system with NUMA hardware you could see a performance impact if Analysis Services needs to access memory located on remote NUMA node. A introduction and discussion on NUMA is outside the scope of this blog post however if you would like to know more, the following article provides some background on the topic http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178144(v=sql.105).aspx