Spin detection hardware for improved management of multithreaded systems
Spinning is a synchronization mechanism commonly used in applications and operating systems. Excessive spinning, however, often indicates performance or correctness (e.g., livelock) problems. Detecting if applications and operating systems are spinning is essential for achieving high performance, especially in consolidated servers running virtual machines. Prior research has used source or binary instrumentation to detect spinning. However, these approaches place a significant burden on programmers and may even be infeasible in certain situations. In this paper, we propose efficient hardware to detect spinning in unmodified applications and operating systems. Based on this hardware, we develop 1) scheduling and power policies that adaptively manage resources for spinning threads, 2) system support that helps detect when a multithreaded program is livelocked, and 3) hardware performance counters that accurately reflect system performance. Using full-system simulation with SPEC OMP, SPLASH-2, and Wisconsin commercial workloads, we demonstrate that our mechanisms effectively improve the management of multithreaded systems. © 2006 IEEE.
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- Distributed Computing
- 4606 Distributed computing and systems software
- 1005 Communications Technologies
- 0805 Distributed Computing
- 0803 Computer Software
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Distributed Computing
- 4606 Distributed computing and systems software
- 1005 Communications Technologies
- 0805 Distributed Computing
- 0803 Computer Software