Predicting Cache Space Contention in Utility Computing Servers

The need to provide performance guarantee in high performance servers has long been neglected. Providing performance guarantee in current and future servers is difficult because fine-grain resources, such as on-chip caches, are shared by multiple processors or thread contexts. Although inter-thread cache sharing generally improves the overall throughput of the system, the impact of cache contention on the threads that share it is highly non-uniform: some threads may be slowed down significantly, while others are not. This may cause severe performance problems such as sub-optimal throughput, cache thrashing, and thread starvation for threads that fail to occupy sufficient cache space to make good progress. Clearly, this situation is not desirable when performance guarantee needs to be provided, such as in utility computing servers. Unfortunately, there is no existing model that allows extensive investigation of the impact of cache sharing. To allow such a study, we propose an inducti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Yan Solihin, Fei Guo, Seongbeom Kim
• Keywords: Cache Sharing, Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2005, Model, Performance Guarantee