Autonomic Parallelism and Thread Mapping Control on Software Transactional Memory

• Published in: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC) pp. 189 - 198
• Main Authors: Zhou, Naweiluo, Delaval, Gwenael, Robu, Bogdan, Rutten, Eric, Mehaut, Jean-Francois
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.07.2016
• Subjects: autonomic; Feedback control; Instruction sets; Parallel processing; parallelism adaptation; Runtime; Synchronization; thread affinity; Throughput; transactional memory
• DOI: 10.1109/ICAC.2016.54

Parallel programs need to manage the trade-off between the time spent in synchronization and computation. The time trade-off is affected by the number of active threads significantly. High parallelism may decrease computing time while increase synchronization cost. Furthermore thread locality on different cores may impact on program performance too, as the memory access time can vary from one core to another due to the complexity of the underlying memory architecture. Therefore the performance of a program can be improved by adjusting the number of active threads as well as the mapping of its threads to physical cores. However, there is no universal rule to decide the parallelism and the thread locality for a program from an offline view. Furthermore, an offline tuning is error-prone. In this paper, we dynamically manage parallelism and thread localities. We address multiple threads problems via Software Transactional Memory (STM). STM has emerged as a promising technique, which bypasses locks, to address synchronization issues through transactions. Autonomic computing offers designers a framework of methods and techniques to build autonomic systems with well-mastered behaviours. Its key idea is to implement feedback control loops to design safe, efficient and predictable controllers, which enable monitoring and adjusting controlled systems dynamically while keeping overhead low. We propose to design a feedback control loop to automate thread management at runtime and diminish program execution time.