The Case of Unsustainable CPU Affinity
Jiechen Zhao, Katie Lim, Thomas E. Anderson, Natalie Enright Jerger · 2023
CPU affinity reduces data copies and improves data locality and has become a prevalent technique for high-performance programs in datacenters. This paper explores the tension between CPU affinity and sustainability. In particular, affinity settings can lead to significant uneven aging of cores on a CPU. We observe that infrastructure threads, used in a wide spectrum of network, storage, and virtualization sub-systems, exercise their affinitized cores up to 23× more when compared to typical μs-scale application threads. In addition, we observe that the affinitized infrastructure threads generate regional heat hot spots and preclude CPUs from being used with the expected lifetime. Finally, we discuss design options to tackle the unbalanced core-aging problem to improve the overall sustainability of CPUs and call for more attention to sustainability-aware affinity and mitigation of such problems.