USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, General Track — Abstract
Pp. 395–398 of the Proceedings
Performance of Multithreaded Chip Multiprocessors and Implications for
Operating System Design
Alexandra Fedorova, Harvard University and Sun Microsystems; Margo Seltzer, Harvard University; Christopher Small and Daniel Nussbaum, Sun Microsystems
Abstract
We investigated how operating system
design should be adapted for multithreaded chip multiprocessors (CMT)—a new
generation of processors that exploit thread-level parallelism to mask the
memory latency in modern workloads. We determined that the L2 cache is a
critical shared resource on CMT and that an insufficient amount of L2 cache can
undermine the ability to hide memory latency on these processors. To use the L2 cache as efficiently as
possible, we propose an L2-conscious scheduling algorithm and quantify its
performance potential. Using this
algorithm it is possible to reduce miss ratios in the L2 cache by 25-37% and
improve processor throughput by 27-45%.
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