loading...
 This Article 
   
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
13th International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation Techniques (PACT'04)
Architectural Support for Enhanced SMT Job Scheduling
Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France
September 29-October 03
ISBN: 0-7695-2229-7
Alex Settle, University of Colorado at Boulder
Joshua Kihm, University of Colorado at Boulder
Andrew Janiszewski, University of Colorado at Boulder
Dan Connors, University of Colorado at Boulder
By converting thread-level parallelism to instruction level parallelism, Simultaneous Multithreaded (SMT) processors are emerging as effective ways to utilize the resources of modern superscalar architectures. However, the full potential of SMT has not yet been reached as most modern operating systems use existing single-thread or multiprocessor algorithms to schedule threads, neglecting contention for resources between threads. To date, even the best SMT scheduling algorithms simply try to group threads for co-residency based on each thread's expected resource utilization but do not take into account variance in thread behavior. As such, we introduce architectural support that enables new thread scheduling algorithms to group threads for co-residency based on fine-grain memory system activity information. The proposed memory monitoring framework centers on the concept of a cache activity vector, which exposes runtime cache resource information to the operating system to improve job scheduling. Using this scheduling technique, we experimentally evaluate the overall performance improvement of workloads on an SMT machine compared against the most recent Linux job scheduler. This work is first motivated with experiments in a simulated environment, then validated on a Hyperthreading-enabled Intel Pentium-4 Xeon microprocessor running a modified version of the latest Linux Kernel.
Citation:
Alex Settle, Joshua Kihm, Andrew Janiszewski, Dan Connors, "Architectural Support for Enhanced SMT Job Scheduling," pact, pp.63-73, 13th International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation Techniques (PACT'04), 2004
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.