Fine-Tuning Throughput and QoS on SMT Cores
Cavide Balkı GEMİRTER, Gürhan Küçük · 2021 6th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK) · 2021
The SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) architecture is widely used in modern processors. It provides a performance gain in the system by running multiple threads simultaneously to better utilize datapath resources. In this architecture, one of the research areas is how to allocate common resources among threads. In the static approach, resources are allocated to threads equally or according to a specific predefined rule. In the dynamic approach, monitoring the system at runtime, the most appropriate allocation strategy is chosen. Hill-Climbing and Stretch are two examples of dynamic resource allocation methods. This paper proposes a hybrid approach that combines Stretch with the Hill-climbing method to improve both the throughput and the QoS metrics of the SMT processor. We compare our QoS-Oriented and Throughput-Oriented methods, showing that we can satisfy a target QoS on a latency-sensitive thread, while still achieving near-optimal (only an average of 0.6% worst performance over the Throughput-Oriented method) throughput with our QoS-Oriented approach.