Communication-aware thread mapping using the translation lookaside buffer

摘要

Threads of parallel applications need to communicate in order to fulfill their tasks. The communicationrnperformance between the cores in modern multi-core architectures differs because of the memory and interconnectionrnhierarchies. In these architectures, it is important to map the threads of parallel applications byrntaking into account the communication between them, to improve their performance and energy consumption.rnIn parallel applications based on shared memory, communication is implicit, which makes it difficultrnto detect the communication pattern between the threads.rnIn this paper, we introduce a new lightweight mechanism to detect the communication pattern betweenrnthreads of shared memory applications using the translation lookaside buffer. Our mechanism relies on hardwarernfeatures, which make it transparent to the programmer and allow the detection to be performed by thernoperating system during the execution of the application. We also developed a heuristic mapping algorithmrnthat uses the detected pattern to dynamically map the threads to cores. Experiments were performed withrnapplications from the NAS-OMP and PARSEC parallel benchmark suites in a simulated machine as well as arnreal machine. Results show that our mechanism can substantially improve parallel application performance,rnas well as processor and DRAM energy consumption.