[chaps]

You might just be going down a deep rabbit hole with these questions :)

You can definitely do things like that, including pinning an application to a certain set of cores for performance. When you have NUMA it's pretty much mandatory for low latency applications, since each CPU gets its own memory slots, significantly lowering latency cost. It's physically closer, for one.

It gets really fun when you get into network traffic, since you can bind a NIC to specific cores alongside kernel bypass stuffs and interrupt handling. Sometimes it even makes sense to have one NIC per CPU!

It's a lot of setup work though. Have a look into CPU shielding as well. The Linux scheduler cares more about fairness than it does latency, so you have to be very intentional in your setup.