Locality-aware dynamic mapping for multithreaded applications

Abstract

Locality analysis of an application helps us extract data access patterns and predict runtime cache behavior. In this paper, we propose a locality-aware dynamic mapping algorithm for multithreaded applications, which assigns computations with similar data access patterns to same cores.We collect the amounts of shared and distinct data used by all computations, called chunks and calculate sharing among those chunks. Then, chunks with the similar data access patterns are grouped into bins, which are subsequently assigned to threads for improving cache reuse and program performance. Our algorithm is illustrated with sparse matrix-vector multiply (SpMV), which is one of the most widely used kernel in engineering and scientific computing and suffers from irregular and indirect memory access patterns. Five inputs with different shapes and characteristics are considered for testing the performance of our algorithm. Based on the results of experimental study, our algorithm outperforms Linux scheduler with an average of 12.5% performance improvement for various scenarios considered. © 2012 IEEE.