Performance Impact of Resource Conflicts on Chip Multi-processor Servers

摘要

Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs) are becoming mainstream microprocessors for High Performance Computing and commercial business applications as well. Multiple CPU cores on CMPs allow multiple software threads executing on the same chip at the same time. Thus they promise to deliver higher capacity of computations performed per chip in a given time interval. However, resource sharing among the threads executing on the same chip can cause conflicts and lead to performance degradation. Thus, in order to obtain high performance and scalability on CMP servers, it is crucial to first understand the performance impact that the resource conflicts have on the target applications. In this paper, we evaluate the performance impact of the resource conflicts on an example high-end CMP server, Sun Fire E25K, using a standard OpenMP benchmark suite, SPEC OMPL.