Title
Hardware prediction of OS run-length for fine-grained resource customization
Abstract
In the past ten years, computer architecture has seen a paradigm shift from emphasizing single thread performance to energy efficient, throughput oriented, chip multiprocessors. Several studies have suggested that it may be worthwhile to off-load execution of the operating system (OS) to one or more of these cores, or reconfigure hardware during OS execution. To be effective, these techniques must balance the cost of off-loading or re-configuration, versus the potential benefits, which are typically unknown at decision time. These decision points are typically implemented by manually instrumenting a few OS routines (out of hundreds). Such a preliminary research effort cannot be sustained across several operating systems and hardware configurations. We argue that decisions made in software are often sub-optimal because they are expensive in terms of run-time overhead and because applications vary in their use of OS features. We propose that these decision mechanisms should be supported through a hardware based OS run-length predictor, that removes the onus from OS developers. Our final design results in a 95% prediction accuracy for OS intensive applications, while requiring only 2 KB of storage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/ISPASS.2010.5452057
Performance Analysis of Systems & Software
Keywords
Field
DocType
computer architecture,multiprocessing systems,operating systems (computers),OS run-length predictor,chip multiprocessors,computer architecture,fine-grained resource customization,operating system
Computer science,Real-time computing,Software,Throughput,Computer hardware,Process management (computing),Application software,Personalization,Efficient energy use,Parallel computing,Thread (computing),Chip,Operating system
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4244-6024-3
0
0.34
References 
Authors
1
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David W. Nellans126412.33
Kshitij Sudan21908.71
Rajeev Balasubramonian32302116.79
Erik Brunvand450966.09