Controlled Data and Resource Sharing in Multi-Core Platforms
- Speaker
Sandhya Dwarkadas
, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA
- Date and Time
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 13.30
- Location
Polacksbaken, room 2446
- Abstract
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Technology projections indicate the possibility of 50 billion transistors on a chip in a few years, with the processor landscape being dominated by multi-core designs.
Developing correct and reliable software that takes advantage of the multiple cores to deliver high performance, while at the same time ensuring performance isolation, remains a growing challenge.
In this talk, I will begin by describing our changes to existing coherence mechanisms in order to control data sharing --- in particular, to monitor memory, isolate data modifications, support fine-grain protection, and improve the efficiency of fine-grain sharing. I will discuss the utility of the mechanisms for a range of applications and show how monitoring and isolation can be combined to support one parallel programming construct --- transactional memory.
The prevalence of multi-core processors also implies more ubiquitous resource sharing at several levels. Controlled resource sharing is essential in order to provide performance isolation, dictating the need for resource-aware policies within the operating system.
As time permits, I will also describe our efforts in combining resource utilization prediction, resource control mechanisms, and resource-aware policies in order to effect performance isolation at the operating system level and improve multi-core resource utilization.