Thread Level Parallelism and Interactive Performance of Desktop Applications

Multiprocessing is already prevalent in servers where multiple clients present an obvious source of thread-level parallelism. However, the case for multiprocessing is less clear for desktop applications. Nevertheless, architects are designing processors that count on the availability of thread-level parallelism. Unlike server workloads, the primary requirement of interactive applications is to respond to user events under human perception bounds rather than to maximize end-to-end throughput. In this paper we report on the thread-level parallelism and interactive response time of a variety of desktop applications. By tracking the communication between tasks, we can focus our measurements on the portions of the benchmark’s execution that have the greatest impact on the user. We find that running our benchmarks on a dual-processor machine improves response time of mouse-click events by as much as 36%, and 22% on average—out of a maximum possible 50%. The benefits of multiprocessing a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Krisztián Flautner, Richard Uhlig, Steven K. Reinhardt, Trevor N. Mudge
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2000, Multiprocessing, Programming Languages, Response Times, Thread-level Parallelism