Thread assignment in multicore/multithreaded processors: A statistical approach

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The introduction of multicore/multithreaded processors, comprised of a large number of hardware contexts (virtual CPUs) that share resources at multiple levels, has made process scheduling, in particular assignment of running threads to available hardware contexts, an important aspect of system performance. Nevertheless, thread assignment of applications running on state-of-the art processors is an NP-complete problem. Over the years, numerous studies have proposed heuristic-based algorithms for thread assignment. Since the thread assignment problem is intractable, it is in general impossible to know the performance of the optimal assignment, so the room for improvement of a given algorithm is also unknown. It is therefore hard to decide whether to invest more effort and time to improve an algorithm that may already be close to optimal. In this paper, we present a statistical approach to the thread assignment problem. First, we present a method that predicts the performance of the optimal thread assignment, based on the observed performance of each thread assignment in a random sample. The method is based on Extreme Value Theory (EVT), a branch of statistics that analyses extreme deviations from the population mean. We also propose sample pruning, a method that significantly reduces the time required to apply the statistical method by reducing the number of candidate solutions that need to be measured. Finally, we show that, if no suitable heuristic-based algorithm is available, a sample of several thousand random thread assignments is enough to obtain, with high confidence, an assignment with performance close to optimal. The presented approach is architecture and application independent, and it can be used to address the thread assignment problem in various domains. It is especially well suited for systems in which the workload seldom changes. An example is network systems, which typically provide a constant set of services that are known in advance, with network applications performing a similar processing algorithm for each packet in the system. In this paper, we validate our methods with an industrial case study for a set of multithreaded network applications on an UltraSPARC T2 processor. This article is an extension of our previous work [ 44], which was published in Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS-2012).This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2012-34557, the HiPEAC Network of Excellence, and by the European Research Council under the European Union’s 7th FP, ERC Grant Agreement number 321253. Miquel Moreto has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship number JCI-2012-15047.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Analysis and architectural support for parallel stateful packet processing

The evolution of network services is closely related to the network technology trend. Originally network nodes forwarded packets from a source to a destination in the network by executing lightweight packet processing, or even negligible workloads. As links provide more complex services, packet processing demands the execution of more computational intensive applications. Complex network applications deal with both packet header and payload (i.e. packet contents) to provide upper layer network services, such as enhanced security, system utilization policies, and video on demand management.Applications that provide complex network services arise two key capabilities that differ from the low layer network applications: a) deep packet inspection examines the packet payload tipically searching for a matching string or regular expression, and b) stateful processing keeps track information of previous packet processing, unlike other applications that don't keep any data about other packet processing. In most cases, deep packet inspection also integrates stateful processing.Computer architecture researches aim to maximize the system throughput to sustain the required network processing performance as well as other demands, such as memory and I/O bandwidth. In fact, there are different processor architectures depending on the sharing degree of hardware resources among streams (i.e. hardware context). Multicore architectures present multiple processing engines within a single chip that share cache levels of memory hierarchy and interconnection network. Multithreaded architectures integrates multiple streams in a single processing engine sharing functional units, register file, fecth unit, and inner levels of cache hierarchy. Scalable multicore multithreaded architectures emerge as a solution to overcome the requirements of high throughput systems. We call massively multithreaded architectures to the architectures that comprise tens to hundreds of streams distributed across multiple cores on a chip. Nevertheless, the efficient utilization of these architectures depends on the application characteristics. On one hand, emerging network applications show large computational workloads with significant variations in the packet processing behavior. Then, it is important to analyze the behavior of each packet processing to optimally assign packets to threads (i.e. software context) for reducing any negative interaction among them. On the other hand, network applications present Packet Level Parallelism (PLP) in which several packets can be processed in parallel. As in other paradigms, dependencies among packets limit the amount of PLP. Lower network layer applications show negligible packet dependencies. In contrast, complex upper network applications show dependencies among packets leading to reduce the amount of PLP.In this thesis, we address the limitations of parallelism in stateful network applications to maximize the throughput of advanced network devices. This dissertation comprises three complementary sets of contributions focused on: network analysis, workload characterization and architectural proposal.The network analysis evaluates the impact of network traffic on stateful network applications. We specially study the impact of network traffic aggregation on memory hierarchy performance. We categorize and characterize network applications according to their data management. The results point out that stateful processing presents reduced instruction level parallelism and high rate of long latency memory accesses. Our analysis reveal that stateful applications expose a variety of levels of parallelism related to stateful data categories. Thus, we propose the MultiLayer Processing (MLP) as an execution model to exploit multiple levels of parallelism. The MLP is a thread migration based mechanism that increases the sinergy among streams in the memory hierarchy and alleviates the contention in critical sections of parallel stateful workloads

Improving the effective use of multithreaded architectures : implications on compilation, thread assignment, and timing analysis

This thesis presents cross-domain approaches that improve the effective use of multithreaded architectures. The contributions of the thesis can be classified in three groups. First, we propose several methods for thread assignment of network applications running in multithreaded network servers. Second, we analyze the problem of graph partitioning that is a part of the compilation process of multithreaded streaming applications. Finally, we present a method that improves the measurement-based timing analysis of multithreaded architectures used in time-critical environments. The following sections summarize each of the contributions. (1) Thread assignment on multithreaded processors: State-of-the-art multithreaded processors have different level of resource sharing (e.g. between thread running on the same core and globally shared resources). Thus, the way that threads of a given workload are assigned to processors' hardware contexts determines which resources the threads share, which, in turn, may significantly affect the system performance. In this thesis, we demonstrate the importance of thread assignment for network applications running in multithreaded servers. We also present TSBSched and BlackBox scheduler, methods for thread assignment of multithreaded network applications running on processors with several levels of resource sharing. Finally, we propose a statistical approach to the thread assignment problem. In particular, we show that running a sample of several hundred or several thousand random thread assignments is sufficient to capture at least one out of 1% of the best-performing assignments with a very high probability. We also describe the method that estimates the optimal system performance for given workload. We successfull y applied TSBSched, BlackBox scheduler, and the presented statistical approach to a case study of thread assignment of multithreaded network applications running on the UltraSPARC T2 processor. (2) Kernel partitioning of streaming applications: An important step in compiling a stream program to multiple processors is kernel partitioning. Finding an optimal kernel partition is, however, an intractable problem. We propose a statistical approach to the kernel partitioning problem. We describe a method that statistically estimates the performance of the optimal kernel partition. We demonstrate that the sampling method is an important part of the analysis, and that not all methods that generate random samples provide good results. We also show that random sampling on its own can be used to find a good kernel partition, and that it could be an alternative to heuristics-based approaches. The presented statistical method is applied successfully to the benchmarks included in the StreamIt 2.1.1 suite. (3) Multithreaded processors in time-critical environments: Despite the benefits that multithreaded commercial-of-the-shelf (MT COTS) processors may offer in embedded real-time systems, the time-critical market has not yet embraced a shift toward these architectures. The main challenge with MT COTS architectures is the difficulty when predicting the execution time of concurrently-running (co-running) time-critical tasks. Providing a timing analysis for real industrial applications running on MT COTS processors becomes extremely difficult because the execution time of a task, and hence its worst-case execution time (WCET) depends on the interference with co-running tasks in shared processor resources. We show that the measurement-based timing analysis used for single-threaded processors cannot be directly extended for MT COTS architectures. Also, we propose a methodology that quantifies the slowdown that a task may experience because of collision with co-running tasks in shared resources of MT COTS processor. The methodology is applied to a case study in which different time-critical applications were executed on several MT COTS multithreaded processors