As the number of cores integrated on a single chip continues to increase, communication has the potential to become a severe bottleneck to overall system performance. The presence of thread sharing and the distribution of data across cache banks on the chip can result in long distance communication. Long distance communication incurs substantial latency that impacts performance; furthermore, this communication consumes significant dynamic power when packets are switched over many Network-on-Chip (NoC) links and routers. Thread migration can mitigate problems created by long distance communication. This thesis presents Moths, which stands for Mobile Threads. Moths is an efficient run-time algorithm that responds automatically to dynamic NoC traffic patterns, providing beneficial thread migration to decrease overall traffic volume and average packet latency. Moths reduces latency by up to 28.4% (18.0% on average) and traffic volume by up to 24.9% (20.6% on average) across a variety of commercial and scientific benchmarks.

As the number of cores integrated on a single chip continues to increase, communication has the potential to become a severe bottleneck to overall system performance. The presence of thread sharing and the distribution of data across cache banks on the chip can result in long distance communication. Long distance communication incurs substantial latency that impacts performance; furthermore, this communication consumes significant dynamic power when packets are switched over many Network-on-Chip (NoC) links and routers. Thread migration can mitigate problems created by long distance communication. This thesis presents Moths, which stands for Mobile Threads. Moths is an efficient run-time algorithm that responds automatically to dynamic NoC traffic patterns, providing beneficial thread migration to decrease overall traffic volume and average packet latency. Moths reduces latency by up to 28.4% (18.0% on average) and traffic volume by up to 24.9% (20.6% on average) across a variety of commercial and scientific benchmarks.

One of the primary goals of Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) research is to minimize network traffic and reduce the latency. One way to solve this problem is to use thread migration. In this thesis, we show how thread migration is implemented in a CDPthread-based system. To maintain high portability and flexibility, a generic thread migration package is implemented as a user library. This mechanism can be used to better utilize system resources and improve performance of a CDPthread-based system. It also provides programmer an easy way to migrate threads between different nodes. Moreover, we use thread migration to implement dynamic load balance. Our experimental results show that the dynamic load balance can improve system performance significantly in the average case.