Energy-efficient work-stealing language runtimes

Abstract

Work stealing is a promising approach to constructing multithreaded program runtimes of parallel programming languages. This paper presents HERMES, an energy-efficient work-stealing language runtime. The key insight is that threads in a work-stealing environment -- thieves and victims - have varying impacts on the overall program running time, and a coordination of their execution "tempo" can lead to energy efficiency with minimal performance loss. The centerpiece of HERMES is two complementary algorithms to coordinate thread tempo: the workpath-sensitive algorithm determines tempo for each thread based on thief-victim relationships on the execution path, whereas the workload-sensitive algorithm selects appropriate tempo based on the size of work-stealing deques. We construct HERMES on top of Intel Cilk Plus's runtime, and implement tempo adjustment through standard Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). Benchmarks running on HERMES demonstrate an average of 11-12% energy savings with an average of 3-4% performance loss through meter-based measurements over commercial CPUs.