The home-forwarding mechanism to reduce the cache coherence overhead in next-generation CMPs

On the road to computer systems able to support the requirements of exascale applications, Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs) are equipped with an ever increasing number of cores interconnected through fast on-chip networks. To exploit such new architectures, the parallel software must be able to scale almost linearly with the number of cores available. To this end, the overhead introduced by the run-time system of parallel programming frameworks and by the architecture itself must be small enough in order to enable high scalability also for very fine-grained parallel programs. An approach to reduce this overhead is to use non-conventional architectural mechanisms revealing useful when certain concurrency patterns in the running application are statically or dynamically recognized. Following this idea, this paper proposes a run-time support able to reduce the effective latency of inter-thread cooperation primitives by lowering the contention on individual caches. To achieve this goal, the new home-forwarding hardware mechanism is proposed and used by our runtime in order to reduce the amount of cache-to-cache interactions generated by the cache coherence protocol. Our ideas have been emulated on the Tilera TILEPro64 CMP, showing a significant speedup improvement in some first benchmarks

Structured Parallel Programming and Cache Coherence in Multicore Architectures

It is clear that multicore processors have become the building blocks of today’s high-performance computing platforms. The advent of massively parallel single-chip microprocessors further emphasizes the gap that exists between parallel architectures and parallel programming maturity. Our research group, starting from the experiences on distributed and shared memory multiprocessor, was one of the first to propose a Structured Parallel Programming approach to bridge this gap. In this scenario, one of the biggest problems is that an application’s performance is often affected by the sharing pattern of data and its impact on Cache Coherence. Currently multicore platforms rely on hardware or automatic cache coherence techniques that allow programmers to develop programs without taking into account the problem. It is well known that standard coherency protocols are inefficient for certain data communication patterns and these inefficiencies will be amplified by the increased core number and the complex memory hierarchies. Following a structured parallelism approach, our methodology to attack these problems is based on two interrelated issues: structured parallelism paradigms and cost models (or performance models). Evaluating the performance of a program, although widely studied, is still an open problem in the research community and, notably, specific cost models to de- scribe multicores are missing. For this reason in this thesis, we define an abstract model for cache coherent architectures, which is able to capture the essential elements and the qualitative behaviors of multicore-based systems. Furthermore, we show how this abstract model combined with well known performance modelling techniques, such as analytical modelling (e.g., queueing models and stochastic process algebras) or simulations, provide an application- and architecture-dependent cost model to predict structured parallel applications performances. Starting out from the behavior and performance predictability of structured parallelism schemes, in this thesis we address the issue of cache coherence in multicore architectures, following an algorithm-dependent approach, a particular kind of software cache coherence solution characterized by explicit cache management strategies, which are specific of the algorithm to be executed. Notably, we ensure parallel correctness by exploiting architecture-specific mechanisms and by defining proper data structures in order to “emulate” cache coherence solutions in an efficient way for each computation. Algorithm-dependent cache coherence can be efficiently implemented at the support level of structured parallelism paradigms, with absolute transparency with respect to the application programmer. Moreover, by using the cost model, in this thesis we study and compare different algorithm-dependent implementations, such as those based on automatic cache coherence with respect to an original, non-automatic and lock-free solution based on interprocessor communications. Notably, with this latter implementation, in some cases, we are able to reduce the number of memory accesses, cache transfers and synchronizations and increasing computation parallelism with respect to the use of automatic cache coherence. Current architectures do not usually allow disabling automatic cache coherence. However, the emergence of many-core architectures somewhat changed the scenario, so that some architectures, such as the Tilera TilePro64, allow to control and disable the automatic cache coherence facilities. For this reason, in this thesis we finally apply our methodology to TilePro64 platform in order provide a further validation of the results obtained by our cost model

Modello dei costi delle tecniche di cache coherence nelle architetture multiprocessor

In questa tesi viene affrontato il problema della Cache Coherence nelle architetture multiprocessor. Dopo aver introdotto le principali tecniche messe a disposizione dal livello hardware-firmware di questi sistemi e i principali protocolli di cache coherence sviluppati per la risoluzione di questo problema, vengono descritte le due principali strategie di implementazione. Da una parte abbiamo la soluzione snoopy-based che fa uso di un bus come punto di centralizzazione a livello firmware, dall’altra la soluzione adottata nei sistemi a più alto grado di parallelismo basata sul concetto di directory. Una soluzione alternativa è l’approccio algorithm-dependent che permette di affrontare la risoluzione del problema della cache coherence nella progettazione del supporto della mutua esclusione. Nella tesi è stato sviluppato un modello dei costi che usa come punto di partenza la valutazione delle prestazioni delle architetture multiprocessor basata sulla teoria delle code. Il modello presentato permette di valutare l’impatto che questi due approcci hanno sulle prestazioni dei programmi paralleli, mettendo in evidenza come l’approccio algorithm-dependent riesca a minimizzare il numero di trasferimenti di blocchi di cache e di comunicazioni interprocessor rispetto alle soluzioni automatiche

Map, Reduce and MapReduce, the skeleton way

Composition of Map and Reduce algorithmic skeletons have been widely studied at the end of the last century and it has demonstrated effective on a wide class of problems. We recall the theoretical results motivating the introduction of these skeletons, then we discuss an experiment implementing three algorithmic skeletons, a map, a reduce and an optimized composition of a map followed by a reduce skeleton (map+reduce). The map+reduce skeleton implemented computes the same kind of problems computed by Google MapReduce, but the data flow through the skeleton is streamed rather than relying on already distributed (and possibly quite large) data items. We discuss the implementation of the three skeletons on top of ProActive/GCM in the MareMare prototype and we present some experimental obtained on a COTS cluster