Balancing HPC applications through smart allocation of resources in MT processors

Abstract—Many studies have shown that load imbalancing causes significant performance degradation in High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Nowadays, Multi-Threaded (MT1 ) processors are widely used in HPC for their good performance/energy consumption and performance/cost ratios achieved sharing internal resources, like the instruction window or the physical register. Some of these processors provide the software hardware mechanisms for controlling the allocation of processor’s internal resources. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that by appropriately using these mechanisms, we are able to control the tasks speed, reducing the imbalance in parallel applications transparently to the user and, hence, reducing the total execution time. Our results show that our proposal leads to a performance improvement up to 18% for one of the NAS benchmark. For a real HPC application (much more dynamic than the benchmark) the performance improvement is 8.1%. Our results also sh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Carlos Boneti, Roberto Gioiosa, Francisco J. Cazorla, Julita Corbalán, Jesús Labarta, Mateo Valero
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Internal Resources, IPPS 2008, Performance, Significant Performance Degradation