Phase-based tuning for better utilized performance-asymmetric multicores

Thumbnail Image
Date
2009-01-01
Authors
Sondag, Tyler
Major Professor
Advisor
Hridesh Rajan
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Altmetrics
Authors
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Organizational Unit
Computer Science

Computer Science—the theory, representation, processing, communication and use of information—is fundamentally transforming every aspect of human endeavor. The Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University advances computational and information sciences through; 1. educational and research programs within and beyond the university; 2. active engagement to help define national and international research, and 3. educational agendas, and sustained commitment to graduating leaders for academia, industry and government.

History
The Computer Science Department was officially established in 1969, with Robert Stewart serving as the founding Department Chair. Faculty were composed of joint appointments with Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical Engineering. In 1969, the building which now houses the Computer Science department, then simply called the Computer Science building, was completed. Later it was named Atanasoff Hall. Throughout the 1980s to present, the department expanded and developed its teaching and research agendas to cover many areas of computing.

Dates of Existence
1969-present

Related Units

Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Department
Computer Science
Abstract

The latest trend towards performance asymmetry among cores on a single chip of a multicore processor is posing new software engineering challenges for developers. A key challenge is that for effective utilization of these performance-asymmetric multicore processors, application threads must be assigned to cores such that the resource needs of a thread closely matches resource availability at the assigned core. Determining this assignment manually is tedious, error prone, and it significantly complicates software development. We contribute a transparent and fully-automatic program analysis, which we call phase-guided tuning, to solve this problem. Phase-guided tuning adapts an application to effectively utilize performance-asymmetric cores of a processor. Our technique does not require any changes in the compiler or operating system, thus it is easy to deploy in existing tool chains. It does not require any input from the programmer except the application. Furthermore, it is independent of the characteristics (performance-asymmetry) of the target multicore processor, which has two benefits. First, it avoids the need to create multiple customizations of the binary for each target architecture, and second it relieves the programmer of the burden of anticipating the target architecture. Last but not least, our technique significantly improves performance. Compared to the stock Linux scheduler, our best technique shows 215% improvement in throughput and 36% average process speedup, while maintaining fairness and with negligible overheads.

Comments
Description
Keywords
Citation
Source
Subject Categories
Copyright
Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2009