Analyzing multithreaded applications - Identifying performance bottlenecks on multicore systems

Nandan Tripathi and Amrit Singh, Freescale Semiconductor
EETimes (4/7/2011 11:04 AM EDT)

Abstract

Various aspects preventing applications from achieving theoretical maximum utilization of multicore resources include: operating system (scheduling, synchronization, etc.), application code (parallelization factor, data/function decomposition, etc.), and hardware architecture scalability (cores, memory subsystem, interconnects, etc.).

We use various multithreaded execution scenarios generated through EEMBC's Multibench as stimulus. We introduce a step by step methodology to analyze these scenarios and identify the bottlenecks. Techniques used for kernel tracing, time/function profiling, etc. and tools used to deploy the methodology are discussed next. The paper ends with discussion of various case studies representing different bottlenecks.

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