Characterizing the impact of using spare-cores on application performance [electronic resource].

Published: Washington, D.C. : United States. Dept. of Energy, 2010.
Oak Ridge, Tenn. : Distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Additional Creators: Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States. Department of Energy, and United States. Department of Energy. Office of Scientific and Technical Information

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Summary

Increased parallelism on a single processor is driving improvements in peak-performance at both the node and system levels. However achievable performance, in particular from production scientific applications, is not always directly proportional to the core count. Performance is often limited by constraints in the memory hierarchy and also by a node interconnectivity. Even on state-of-the-art processors, containing between four and eight cores, many applications cannot take full advantage of the compute-performance of all cores. This trend is expected to increase on future processors as the core count per processor increases. In this work we characterize the use of spare-cores, cores that do not provide any improvements in application performance, on current multi-core processors. By using a pulse-width modulation method, we examine the possible performance profile of using a spare-core and quantify under what situations its use will not impact application performance. We show that, for current AMD and Intel multi-core processors, spare-cores can be used for substantial computational tasks but can impact application performance when using shared caches or when significantly accessing main memory.

Report Numbers

E 1.99:la-ur-10-01451
E 1.99: la-ur-10-1451
la-ur-10-1451
la-ur-10-01451

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Note

Published through SciTech Connect.
01/01/2010.
"la-ur-10-01451"
" la-ur-10-1451"
Euro-Par Conference ; August 31, 2010 ; Ischia, Naples, Italy.
Kerbyson, Darren J; Lang, Mike; Sancho Pitarch, Jose Carlos.

Funding Information

AC52-06NA25396

View MARC record | catkey: 14653578