Combine thread with memory scheduling for maximizing performance in multi-core systems

Abstract

The growing gap between microprocessor speed and DRAM speed is a major problem that computer designers are facing. In order to narrow the gap, it is necessary to improve DRAM's speed and throughput. Moreover, on multi-core platforms, DRAM memory shared by all cores usually suffers from the memory contention and interference problem, which can cause serious performance degradation and unfairness among parallel running threads. To address these problems, this paper proposes techniques to take both advantages of partitioning cores, threads and memory banks into groups to reduce interference among different groups and grouping the memory accesses of the same row together to reduce cache miss rate. A memory optimization framework combined thread scheduling with memory scheduling (CTMS) is proposed in this paper, which simultaneously minimizes memory access schedule length, memory access time and reduce interference to maximize performance for multi-core systems. Experimental results show CTMS is 12.6% shorter in memory access time, while improving 11.8% throughput on average. Moreover, CTMS also saves 5.8% of the energy consumption.