Paper Details

Reference:

Reza Azimi, David Tam, Livio Soares, and Michael Stumm,
Enhancing operating system support for multicore processors by using hardware performance monitoring",
ACM SIGOPS Operating System Review; Special Issue on the Interaction among the Operating System, Compilers, and Multicore Processors, 43(2), April, 2009, pp. 55–65.

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Abstract:

Multicore processors contain new hardware characteristics that are different from previous generation single-core systems or traditional SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) multiprocessor systems. These new characteristics provide new performance opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we show how hardware performance monitors can be used to provide a fine-grained, closely-coupled feedback loop to dynamic optimizations done by a multicore-aware operating system. These multicore optimizations are possible due to the advanced capabilities of hardware performance monitoring units currently found in commodity processors, such as execution pipeline stall breakdown and data address sampling.

We demonstrate three case studies on how a multicore-aware operating system can use these online capabilities for (1) determining cache partition sizes, which helps reduce contention in the shared cache among applications, (2) detecting memory regions with bad cache usage, which helps in isolating these regions to reduce cache pollution, and (3) detecting sharing among threads, which helps in clustering threads to improve locality. Using realistic applications from standard benchmark suites, the following performance improvements were achieved: (1) up to 27% improvement in IPC (instructions-per-cycle) due to cache partition sizing; (2) up to 10% reduction in cache miss rates due to reduced cache pollution, resulting in up to 7% improvement in IPC; and (3) up to 70% reduction in remote cache accesses due to thread

Keywords:

operating systems, hardware performance counters, hardware performance monitors, performance measurements, performance modeling

Reference Info:

DOI: 10.1145/1531793.1531803
ACMid: 1531803
ISSN: 0163-5980
OCLC: 630664985

BibTeX:

@article(Azimi-OSR09,
    author = {Reza Azimi and David Tam and Livio Soares and Michael Stumm},
    title = {Enhancing operating system support for multicore processors by using hardware performance monitoring},
    volume = {43},
    number = {2},
    month = {April},
    year = {2009},
    pages = {55-65},
    doi = {10.1145/1531793.1531803},
    issn = {0163-5980},
    keywords = {operating systems, hardware performance counters, hardware performance monitors, performance measurements, performance modeling}
)