Threads and Data Mapping: Affinity Analysis for Traffic Reduction

摘要

Modern processors spend significant amount of time and energy moving data. With the increase in core count, the relative importance of such latency and energy expenditure will only increase with time. Inter-core communication traffic when executing a multithreaded application is one such source of latency and energy expenditure. This traffic is influenced by the mapping of threads and data onto multicore systems. This paper investigates the impact of threads and data mapping on traffic in a chip-multiprocessor, and exploits the potential for traffic reduction through threads and data mapping. Based on the analysis and estimation of the lowest traffic, we propose a threads and data mapping mechanism to approach the lowest traffic. The mapping takes both the correlation among threads and the affinity of data with individual threads into account, and results in significant traffic reduction and energy savings.