ANU Computer Science Technical Reports
TR-CS-12-01
Ting Cao, Tiejun Gao, Stephen M Blackburn, and Kathryn S McKinley.
System Design for Heterogeneity: The Virtual Machine
Services Test Case.
January 2012.
[POSTSCRIPT (2342153 bytes)] [PDF (1790354 bytes)]
Abstract: Power and energy constraints are forcing
architects to propose heterogeneous parallel systems. Unfortunately, tuning
or customizing parallel hardware for a particular application compromises
application portability. This paper focuses on the class of heterogeneous
systems that combine general-purpose big and small cores for portability.
This paper identifies key software characteristics and a framework for
exploiting them to improve performance, power, and energy on big/small
multicores: (1) parallelism, (2) asynchrony, (3) criticality, and (4)
hardware sensitivity. We choose Virtual Machine (VM) services executing
managed languages as our workload. They are pervasive (e.g., JavaScript, PHP,
Java, and C#), dominate power and energy constrained platforms, such as the
phone and tablet, do not compromise application portability, and use a lot of
energy. VM services interpret, compile, profile, schedule, and manage memory
while executing applications. Fortunately, VM services are often parallel,
asynchronous, not on the application's critical path, and are power and
energy efficient on small cores. This paper demonstrates (a) that VM services
consume a lot of power and energy, almost 40% in modern systems; (b) how to
exploit unique combinations of the four characteristics in VM services to
lower power, improve performance, and improve performance per energy (PPE);
and (c) that using big cores for application threads together with tuned
small low-power cores for VM services can substantially lower power and
improve performance per energy (PPE). These results suggest that other system
services, additional architecture tuning or customization, and
software/hardware co-design are fruitful future directions for improving PPE
and meeting power constraints.
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Last modified: Tue Mar 20 17:43:04 EST 2012