Thread clustering
David K. Tam, Reza Azimi, Michael Stumm · 2007
The major chip manufacturers have all introduced chip multiprocessing (CMP) and simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology into their processing units. As a result, even low-end computing systems and game consoles have become shared memory multiprocessors with L1 and L2 cache sharing within a chip. Mid- and large-scale systems will have multiple processing chips and hence consist of an SMP-CMP-SMT configuration with non-uniform data sharing overheads. Current operating system schedulers are not aware of these new cache organizations, and as a result, distribute threads across processors in a way that causes many unnecessary, long-latency cross-chip cache accesses.