Self-similarity of parallel machines
Parallel Computing
Extending and benchmarking the "Big Memory" implementation on Blue Gene/P Linux
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers
Thread Tranquilizer: Dynamically reducing performance variation
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) - HIPEAC Papers
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Understanding the behavior and impact of various sources of Operating System Jitter (OS Jitter) is important not only for tuning a system for HPC applications, but also for the ongoing efforts to create light-weight versions of commercial operating systems such as Linux, that can be used on compute nodes of large scale HPC systems. In this paper, we present a tool that helps in identifying sources of OS Jitter in a commodity operating system such as Linux and measures the impact of OS Jitter through fine grained kernel instrumentation. Our methodology comprises of running a user-level micro-benchmark and measuring the latencies experienced by the benchmark. We then associate each latency to operating system daemons and interrupts using data obtained from kernel instrumentation. We present experimental results that help identify the biggest contributors to the total OS Jitter perceived by an application on a commodity operating system such as Linux. Our results revealed that while 63% of the total jitter comes from timer interrupts, the rest comes from various system daemons and interrupts, most of which can be easily eliminated. The tool presented in this paper can also be used to tune “out of the box” commodity operating systems as well as to detect new sources of operating system jitter that get introduced as software get installed and upgraded on a tuned system.