Resource management for efficient single-ISA heterogeneous computing

Single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core processors (SHMP) have become increasingly important due to their potential to significantly improve the execution efficiency for diverse workloads and thereby alleviate the power density constraints in Chip Multiprocessors (CMP). The importance of SHMP is further underscored by the fact that manufacturing defects and process variation could also cause single-ISA heterogeneity in CMPs even though the CMP is originally designed as homogeneous. However, to fully exploit the execution efficiency that SHMP has to offer, programs have to be efficiently mapped/scheduled to the appropriate cores such that the hardware resources of the cores match the resource demands of the programs, which is challenging and remains an open problem.

This dissertation presents a comprehensive set of off-line and on-line techniques that leverage analytical performance modeling to bridge the gap between the workload diversity and the hardware heterogeneity. For the off-line scenario, this dissertation presents an efficient resource demand analysis framework that can estimate the resource demands of a program based on the inherent characteristics of the program without using any detailed simulation. Based on the estimated resource demands, this dissertation further proposes a multi-dimensional program-core matching technique that projects program resource demands and core configurations to a unified multi-dimensional space, and uses the weighted Euclidean distance between these two to identify the matching program-core pair.

This dissertation also presents a dynamic and predictive application scheduler for SHMPs. It uses a set of hardware-efficient online profilers and an analytical performance model to simultaneously predict the application’s performance on different cores. Based on the predicted performance, the scheduler identifies and enforces near-optimal application assignment for each scheduling interval without any trial runs or off-line profiling. Using only a few kilo-bytes of extra hardware, the proposed heterogeneity-aware scheduler improves the weighted speedup by 11.3% compared with the commodity OpenSolaris scheduler and by 6.8% compared with the best known research scheduler.

Finally, this dissertation presents a predictive yet cost effective mechanism to manage intra-core and/or inter-core resources in dynamic SHMP. It also uses a set of hardware-efficient online profilers and an analytical performance model to predict the application’s performance with different resource allocations. Based on the predicted performance, the resource allocator identifies and enforces near optimum resource partitions for each epoch without any trial runs. The experimental results show that the proposed predictive resource management framework could improve the weighted speedup of the CMP system by an average of 11.6% compared with the equal partition scheme, and 9.3% compared with existing reactive resource management scheme.