Department of Computer Science

Laboratory for Software Design

The research and educational activities described on these pages has been supported in part by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants CCF-11-17937, CCF-10-17334, CNS-07-09217, CNS-06-27354, and a CAREER award 08-46059.

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Phase-based Tuning for Better Utilization of Performance-Asymmetric Multicore Processors

Tyler Sondag and Hridesh Rajan

Abstract

The latest trend towards performance asymmetry among cores on a single chip of a multicore processor is posing new challenges. For effective utilization of these performance-asymmetric multicore processors, code sections of a program must be assigned to cores such that the resource needs of code sections closely matches resource availability at the assigned core. Determining this assignment manually is tedious, error prone, and significantly complicates software development. To solve this problem, we contribute a transparent and fully-automatic process that we call phase-based tuning which adapts an application to effectively utilize performance-asymmetric multicores. Compared to the stock Linux scheduler we see a 36% average process speedup, while maintaining fairness and with negligible overheads.

Bibliographic Information

@inproceedings{Sondag-Rajan-11,
author = {Tyler Sondag and Hridesh Rajan},
title = {Phase-based Tuning for Better Utilization of Performance-Asymmetric Multicore Processors},
booktitle = {International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)},
location = {Chamonix, France},
month = {April},
year = {2011},
}

Most recent paper version: PDF

Previous version appeared as Technical Report 08-14a, Computer Science, Iowa State University, March, 2010. [PDF]