45 research outputs found

    Challenges in computer architecture evaluation

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    Locality-Aware Request Distribution in Cluster-Based Network Servers

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    We consider cluster-based network servers in which a front-end directs incoming requests to one of a number of back-ends. Specifically, we consider content-based request distribution: the front-end uses the content requested, in addition to information about the load on the back-end nodes, to choose which back-end will handle this request. Content-based request distribution can improve locality in the back-ends’ main memory caches, increase secondary storage scalability by partitioning the server’s database, and provide the ability to employ back-end nodes that are specialized for certain types of requests. As a specific policy for content-based request distribution, we introduce a simple, practical strategy for locality-aware request distribution (LARD). With LARD, the front-end distributes incoming requests in a manner that achieves high locality in the back-ends’ main memory caches as well as load balancing. Locality is increased by dynamically subdividing the server’s working set over the back-ends. Trace-based simulation results and measurements on a prototype implementation demonstrate substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art approaches that use only load information to distribute requests. On workloads with working sets that do not fit in a single server node’s main memory cache, the achieved throughput exceeds that of the state-of-the-art approach by a factor of two to four. With content-based distribution, incoming requests must be handed off to a back-end in a manner transparent to the client, after the front-end has inspected the content of the request. To this end, we introduce an efficient TCP handoflprotocol that can hand off an established TCP connection in a client-transparent manner

    Continuation-Passing C: compiling threads to events through continuations

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    In this paper, we introduce Continuation Passing C (CPC), a programming language for concurrent systems in which native and cooperative threads are unified and presented to the programmer as a single abstraction. The CPC compiler uses a compilation technique, based on the CPS transform, that yields efficient code and an extremely lightweight representation for contexts. We provide a proof of the correctness of our compilation scheme. We show in particular that lambda-lifting, a common compilation technique for functional languages, is also correct in an imperative language like C, under some conditions enforced by the CPC compiler. The current CPC compiler is mature enough to write substantial programs such as Hekate, a highly concurrent BitTorrent seeder. Our benchmark results show that CPC is as efficient, while using significantly less space, as the most efficient thread libraries available.Comment: Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (2012). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1202.324

    An Approach for Compiler Optimization to Exploit Instruction Level Parallelism

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