A very thorough article about CPU pinning and NUMA topology awareness, which is what I've been doing lately:
http://redhatstackblog.redhat.com/2015/05/05/cpu-pinning-and-numa-topology-awareness-in-openstack-compute/
Also some background information about tickless kernel:
http://www.breakage.org/2013/11/15/nohz_fullgodmode/
