Performance of Switch Blocking on Multithreaded Architectures
Дата
Авторы
Gopinath,K.
Narasinhan,M. K.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Издатель
Journal of Universal Computer Science
Аннотация
Описание
Block multithreaded architectures tolerate large memory and synchronization latencies by switching contexts on every remote-memory-access or on a failed synchronization request. We study the performance of a waiting mechanism called switch-blocking where waiting threads are disabled (but not unloaded) and signalled at the completion of the wait in comparison with switch_spinning where waiting threads poll and execute in a round-robin fashion. We present an implementation of switch-blocking on a cycle-by-cycle simulator for Alewife (a block multithreaded machine) for both remote memory accesses and synchronization operations and discuss results from the simulator. Our results indicate that while switch-blocking almost always has better performance than switch-spinning, its performance is similar to switch-spinning under heavy lock contention. Support for switch-blocking for remote memory accesses may be appropriate in the future due to their strong interactions with synchronization operations.
Ключевые слова
algorithms , performance , theory-barriers , blocking , competitive analysis , locks , producer_consumer synchronization , spinning , waiting time