Characterization of Shared-memory Multi-core Applications

Abstract

The multicore processor architectures have been gaining increasing popularity in the recent years. However, many available applications cannot take full advantage of these architectures. Therefore, many researchers have developed several characterization techniques to help programmers understand the behavior of these applications on multicore platforms and to tune them for better efficiency. This paper proposes an on-the-fly, configuration-independent characterization approach for characterizing the inherent characteristics of multicore applications. This approach is fast because it does not depend on the details of any specific machine configuration and does not require repeating the characterization for every target configuration. It just keeps track of memory accesses and the cores that perform these accesses through piping memory traces, on-the-fly, to the analysis tool. We applied this approach to characterize eight applications drawn from SPLASH-2 and PARSEC benchmark suites. This paper presents the inherent characteristics of these applications including memory access instructions, communication characteristics patterns, sharing degree, invalidation degree, communication slack, and communication locality. The results show that two of the studied applications have high parallelization overhead, which are Cholesky and Fluidanimate. The results also indicate that studied applications of SPLASH-2 have higher communication rates than the studied applications of PARSEC and these rates generally increase as the number of used threads increases. Most of the sharing and invalidation occurs in small degrees. However, two of SPLASH-2 applications have significant fraction of communication with high sharing degrees involving four or more threads. Most of the applications have some uniform communication component and the initial thread is generally involved in more communication compared to the other threads.

Keywords

• Multi-core processor
• On-the-fly analysis
• Shared memory applications
• Communication patterns
• Performance evaluation