Dynamic thread mapping of shared memory applications by exploiting cache coherence protocols
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
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In current shared memory architectures, the complexity of the cache and memory hierarchies is increasing. Therefore, it is becoming more important to analyze the communication behavior of parallel applications when mapping threads to cores, to improve performance and energy efficiency. However, communication is implicit in most programming models for shared memory, which makes it difficult to detect the communication pattern between the threads in an accurate and low-overhead way. We propose a new mechanism to detect the communication pattern of shared memory applications by monitoring page table accesses. Combining this mechanism with a dynamic migration algorithm allows mapping to be performed dynamically by the operating system. We implemented our mechanism in the Linux kernel and performed experiments with applications from the NAS~Parallel~Benchmarks. Results show a reduction of up to 16.7% of the execution time and 63% of the cache misses, compared to the original scheduler of the operating system. Furthermore, we decrease total processor and DRAM energy consumption by up to 14.7% and 28.5%, respectively.