NDLI: iHarmonizer: Improving the Disk Efficiency of I/O-intensive Multithreaded Codes

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Yizhe Wang Davis, K. Yuehai Xu Song Jiang
Copyright Year	2012
Abstract	Challenged by serious power and thermal constraints and limited by available instruction-level parallelism, processor designs have evolved to multi-core architectures. These architectures, many augmented with native simultaneous multithreading, are driving software developers to use multithreaded programs to exploit thread-level parallelism. While multithreading is well known to introduce concerns of data dependency and CPU load balance, less known is that the uncertainty of relative progress of thread execution can cause patterns of I/O requests, issued by different threads, to be effectively random and so significantly degrade hard-disk efficiency. This effect can severely offset the performance gains from parallel execution, especially for I/O-intensive programs. Retaining the benefits of multithreading while not losing I/O efficiency is an urgent and challenging problem. We propose a user-level scheme, iHarmonizer, to streamline the servicing of I/O requests from multiple threads in the Open MP programs. Specifically, we use the compiler to insert code into Open MP programs so that data usage can be transmitted at run time to a supporting run-time library that prefetches data in a disk friendly way and coordinates threads' execution according to the availability of their requested data. Transparent to the programmer, iHarmonizer makes a multithreaded program I/O efficient while maintaining the benefits of parallelism. Our experiments show that iHarmonizer can significantly speed up the execution of a representative set of I/O-intensive scientific benchmarks.
Starting Page	921
Ending Page	932
File Size	1405637
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781467309752
ISSN	15302075
DOI	10.1109/IPDPS.2012.87
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2012-05-21
Publisher Place	China
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Prefetching Arrays Runtime Multithreading Synchronization Disk Performance I/O Scheduling Multi-threading
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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