MemorIES3: a programmable, real-time hardware emulation tool for multiprocessor server design
ASPLOS IX Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Memory system design space exploration for low-power, real-time speech recognition
Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
Evaluating scheduling policies for fine-grain communication protocols on a cluster of SMPs
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
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This paper proposes a novel queue-based programming abstraction, Parallel Dispatch Queue (PDQ), that enables efficient parallel execution of fine-grain software communication protocols. Parallel systems often use fine-grain software handlers to integrate a network message into computation. Executing such handlers in parallel requires access synchronization around resources. Much as a monitor construct in a concurrent language protects accesses to a set of data structures, PDQ allows messages to include a synchronization key protecting handler accesses to a group of protocol resources. By simply synchronizing messages in a queue prior to dispatch, PDQ not only eliminates the overhead of acquiring/releasing synchronization primitives but also prevents busy-waiting within handlers.In this paper, we study PDQ's impact on software protocol performance in the context of fine-grain distributed shared memory (DSM) on an SMP cluster. Simulation results running shared-memory applications indicate that: (i) parallel software protocol execution using PDQ significantly improves performance in fine-grain DSM, (ii) tight integration of PDQ and embedded processors into a single custom device can offer performance competitive or better than an all-hardware DSM, and (iii) PDQ best benefits cost-effective systems that use idle SMP processors (rather than custom embedded processors) to execute protocols. On a cluster of 4 16-way SMPs, a PDQ-based parallel protocol running on idle SMP processors improves application performance by a factor of 2.6 over a system running a serial protocol on a single dedicated processor.