Efficient Workstealing for Multicore Event-Driven Systems

Many high-performance communicating systems are designed using the event-driven paradigm. As multicore platforms are now pervasive, it becomes crucial for such systems to take advantage of the available hardware parallelism. Eventcoloring is a promising approach in this regard. First, it allows programmers to simply and progressively inject support for the safe, parallel execution of multiple event handlers through the use of annotations. Second, it relies on a workstealing algorithm to dynamically balance the execution of event handlers on the available cores. This paper studies the impact of the workstealing algorithm on the overall system performance. We first show that the only existing workstealing algorithm designed for event-coloring runtimes is not always efficient: for instance, it causes a 33% performance degradation on a Web server. We then introduce several enhancements to improve the workstealing behavior. An evaluation using both microbenchmarks and real applications, a W...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Fabien Gaud, Sylvain Geneves, Renaud Lachaize, Baptiste Lepers, Fabien Mottet, Gilles Muller, Vivien Quéma
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Event Handlers, ICDCS 2010, Web Server, Workstealing Algorithm