RMC: An integrated runtime system for adaptive many-core computing

Abstract

Many-core computing has surfaced as a promising solution to satisfy the rapidly increasing computational needs for various areas ranging from embedded to datacenter computing. However, when allocated with an excessive number of cores, multithreaded applications may fail to achieve optimal performance and energy efficiency due to the contention on software and/or hardware resources. While previous research has proposed adaptive techniques such as thread packing (TP) and dynamic threading (DT), they often lead to sub-optimal results because they are used in an isolated manner. To address this problem, we propose RMC, an integrated runtime system for adaptive many-core computing. Guided by the runtime information of parallel applications, RMC dynamically adapts their execution by combining the TP and DT techniques. We apply RMC to six PARSEC benchmarks that use representative parallelism models (i.e., fork-join, task, and pipeline). We demonstrate that RMC is easy to use, considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques for three PARSEC benchmarks, and incurs a small overhead to the rest of the benchmarks.