La jerarquía de caches y la red en el chip (NoC) son dos componentes clave de los chip multiprocesadores (CMPs). La mayoría del trafico en la NoC se debe a mensajes que las caches envían según lo que establece el protocolo de coherencia. La cantidad de trafico, el porcentaje de mensajes cortos y largos y el patrón de trafico en general varían dependiendo de la geometría de las caches y del protocolo de coherencia. La arquitectura de la NoC y la jerarquía de caches están de hecho firmemente acopladas, y estos dos componentes deben ser diseñados y evaluados conjuntamente para estudiar como el variar uno afecta a las prestaciones del otro. Además, cada componente debe ajustarse a los requisitos y a las oportunidades del otro, y al revés. Normalmente diferentes clases de mensajes se envían por diferentes redes virtuales o por NoCs con diferente ancho de banda, separando mensajes largos y cortos. Sin embargo, otra clasificación de los mensajes se puede hacer dependiendo del tipo de información que proveen: algunos mensajes, como las peticiones de datos, necesitan campos para almacenar información (dirección del bloque, tipo de petición, etc.); otros, como los mensajes de reconocimiento (ACK), no proporcionan ninguna información excepto por el ID del nodo destino: solo proveen una información de tipo temporal, en el sentido que la recepción de un ACK indica que el nodo fuente ha recibido el mensaje al que está contestando con el ACK y completado todas las operaciones determinadas por el protocolo de coherencia. Esta segunda clase de mensaje no necesita de mucho ancho de banda: la latencia es mucho mas importante, dado que el nodo destino esta típicamente bloqueado esperando la recepción de ellos. En este trabajo de tesis se desarrolla una red dedicada para trasmitir la segunda clase de mensajes; la red es muy sencilla y rápida, y permite la entrega de los ACKs con una latencia de pocos ciclos de reloj. Reduciendo la latencia y el trafico en la NoC debido a los ACKs, es posible: -acelerar la fase de invalidación en fase de escritura en un sistema que usa un protocolo de coherencia basado en directorios -mejorar las prestaciones de un protocolo de coerencia basado en broadcast, hasta llegar a prestaciones comparables con las de un protocolo de directorios pero sin el coste de área debido a la necesidad de almacenar el directorio -implementar un mapeado dinámico de bloques a las caches de ultimo nivel de forma eficiente, con el objetivo de acercar cuanto al máximo los bloques a los cores que los utilizan El objetivo final es obtener un co-diseño de NoC y jerarquía de caches que minimice los problemas de escalabilidad de los protocolos de coherencia. Como gran objetivo final, se pretende la implementación de un CMP con ubicación dinámica de los recursos de cache y red, tal que estos recursos se puedan particionar de forma eficiente e independiente para asignar diferentes particiones a diferentes aplicaciones en un entorno virtualizado. / Lodde, M. (2014). Smart Memory and Network-On-Chip Design for High-Performance Shared-Memory Chip Multiprocessors [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/35325

Systems for high performance computing are getting increasingly complex. On the one hand, the number of processors is increasing. On the other hand, the individual processors are getting more and more powerful. In recent years, the latter is to a large extent achieved by increasing the number of cores per processor. Unfortunately, scientific applications often fail to fully utilize the available computational performance. Therefore, performance analysis tools that help to localize and fix performance problems are indispensable. Large scale systems for high performance computing typically consist of multiple compute nodes that are connected via network. Performance analysis tools that analyze performance problems that arise from using multiple nodes are readily available. However, the increasing number of cores per processor that can be observed within the last decade represents a major change in the node architecture. Therefore, this work concentrates on the analysis of the node performance. The goal of this thesis is to improve the understanding of the achieved application performance on existing hardware. It can be observed that the scaling of parallel applications on multi-core processors differs significantly from the scaling on multiple processors. Therefore, the properties of shared resources in contemporary multi-core processors as well as remote accesses in multi-processor systems are investigated and their respective impact on the application performance is analyzed. As a first step, a comprehensive suite of highly optimized micro-benchmarks is developed. These benchmarks are able to determine the performance of memory accesses depending on the location and coherence state of the data. They are used to perform an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of memory accesses in contemporary multi-processor systems, which identifies potential bottlenecks. However, in order to localize performance problems, it also has to be determined to which extend the application performance is limited by certain resources. Therefore, a methodology to derive metrics for the utilization of individual components in the memory hierarchy as well as waiting times caused by memory accesses is developed in the second step. The approach is based on hardware performance counters, which record the number of certain hardware events. The developed micro-benchmarks are used to selectively stress individual components, which can be used to identify the events that provide a reasonable assessment for the utilization of the respective component and the amount of time that is spent waiting for memory accesses to complete. Finally, the knowledge gained from this process is used to implement a visualization of memory related performance issues in existing performance analysis tools. The results of the micro-benchmarks reveal that the increasing number of cores per processor and the usage of multiple processors per node leads to complex systems with vastly different performance characteristics of memory accesses depending on the location of the accessed data. Furthermore, it can be observed that the aggregated throughput of shared resources in multi-core processors does not necessarily scale linearly with the number of cores that access them concurrently, which limits the scalability of parallel applications. It is shown that the proposed methodology for the identification of meaningful hardware performance counters yields useful metrics for the localization of memory related performance limitations.

Cette thèse aborde le problème de la vérification automatique de systèmesparamétrés complexes. Cette approche est importante car elle permet de garantircertaines propriétés sans connaître a priori le nombre de composants dusystème. On s'intéresse en particulier à la sûreté de ces systèmes et on traitele côté paramétré du problème avec des méthodes symboliques. Ces travauxs'inscrivent dans le cadre théorique du model checking modulo théories et ontdonné lieu à un nouveau model checker : Cubicle.Une des contributions principale de cette thèse est une nouvelle technique pourinférer des invariants de manière automatique. Le processus de générationd'invariants est intégré à l'algorithme de model checking et permet de vérifieren pratique des systèmes hors de portée des approches symboliquestraditionnelles. Une des applications principales de cet algorithme estl’analyse de sûreté paramétrée de protocoles de cohérence de cache de tailleindustrielle.Enfin, pour répondre au problème de la confiance placée dans le model checker,on présente deux techniques de certification de notre outil Cubicle utilisantla plate-forme Why3. La première consiste à générer des certificats dont lavalidité est évaluée de manière indépendante tandis que la seconde est uneapproche par vérification déductive du cœur de Cubicle. / This thesis tackles the problem of automatically verifying complexparameterized systems. This approach is important because it can guarantee thatsome properties hold without knowing a priori the number of components in thesystem. We focus in particular on the safety of such systems and we handle theparameterized aspect with symbolic methods. This work is set in the theoreticalframework of the model checking modulo theories and resulted in a new modelchecker: Cubicle.One of the main contribution of this thesis is a novel technique forautomatically inferring invariants. The process of invariant generation isintegrated with the model checking algorithm and allows the verification inpractice of systems which are out of reach for traditional symbolicapproaches. One successful application of this algorithm is the safety analysisof industrial size parameterized cache coherence protocols.Finally, to address the problem of trusting the answer given by the modelchecker, we present two techniques for certifying our tool Cubicle based on theframework Why3. The first consists in producing certificates whose validity canbe assessed independently while the second is an approach by deductiveverification of the heart of Cubicle.

As threads de aplicações paralelas cooperam a fim de cumprir suas tarefas, dessa forma, comunicação é realizada entre elas. A latência de comunicação entre os núcleos em arquiteturas multiprocessadas diferem dependendo da hierarquia de memória e das interconexões. Com o aumento do número de núcleos por chip e número de threads por núcleo, esta diferença entre as latências de comunicação está aumentando. Portanto, é importante mapear as threads de aplicações paralelas levando em conta a comunicação entre elas. Em aplicações paralelas baseadas no paradigma de memória compartilhada, a comunicação é implícita e ocorre através de acessos à variáveis compartilhadas, o que torna difícil a descoberta do padrão de comunicação entre as threads. Mecanismos tradicionais usam simulação para monitorar os acessos à memória realizados pela aplicação, requerendo modificações no código fonte e aumentando drasticamente a sobrecarga. Nesta dissertação de mestrado, são introduzidos dois mecanismos inovadores com uma baixa sobrecarga para se detectar o padrão de comunicação entre threads. O primeiro mecanismo faz uso de informações sobre linhas compartilhadas de caches providas por protocolos de coerência de cache. O segundo mecanismo utiliza a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) para detectar quais páginas de memória cada núcleo está acessando. Ambos os mecanismos dependem totalmente do hardware, o que torna o mapeamento de threads transparente aos programadores e permite que ele seja realizado dinamicamente pelo sistema operacional. Além disto, nenhuma tarefa de alta sobrecarga, como simulação, é requerida. As propostas foram avaliadas com o NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), obtendo representações precisas dos padrões de comunicação. Mapeamentos para as threads foram gerados utilizando os padrões de comunicação descobertos e um algoritmo de mapeamento. O problema do mapeamento é NP-Difícil. Portanto, de forma a se atingir uma complexidade polinomial, o algoritmo empregado é heurístico, baseado no algoritmo de emparelhamento de grafos de Edmonds. Executando as aplicações com o mapeamento resultou em um ganho de desempenho de até 15; 3%. O número de faltas na cache, invalidações em linhas de cache e transações de espionagem foram reduzidos em até 31; 9%, 41% e 65; 4%, respectivamente. / The threads of parallel applications cooperate in order to fulfill their tasks, thereby communication is performed among themselves. The communication latency between the cores in a multiprocessor architecture differs depending on the memory hierarchy and the interconnections. With the increase in the number of cores per chip and the number of threads per core, this difference between the communication latencies is increasing. Therefore, it is important to map the threads of parallel applications taking into account the communication between them. In parallel applications based on the shared memory paradigm, the communication is implicit and occurs through accesses to shared variables, which makes difficult to detect the communication pattern between the threads. Traditional approaches use simulation to monitor the memory accesses performed by the application, requiring modifications to the source code and drastically increasing the overhead. In this master thesis, we introduce two novel light-weight mechanisms to find the communication pattern of threads. The first mechanism makes use of the information about shared cache lines provided by cache coherence protocols. The second mechanism makes use of the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) to detect which memory pages each core is accessing. Both our mechanisms rely entirely on hardware features, which makes the thread mapping transparent to the programmer and allows it to be performed dynamically by the operating system. Moreover, no time consuming task, such as simulation, is required. We evaluated our mechanisms with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and obtained accurate representations of the communication patterns. We generated thread mappings from the detected communication patterns using a mapping algorithm. Mapping is a NP-Hard problem. Therefore, in order to achieve a polynomial complexity, we designed a heuristic method based on the Edmonds graph matching algorithm. Running the applications with these mappings resulted in performance improvements of up to 15.3% compared to the original scheduler of the operating system. The number of cache misses, cache line invalidations and snoop transactions were reduced by up to 31.9%, 41% and 65.4%, respectively.

As threads de aplicações paralelas cooperam a fim de cumprir suas tarefas, dessa forma, comunicação é realizada entre elas. A latência de comunicação entre os núcleos em arquiteturas multiprocessadas diferem dependendo da hierarquia de memória e das interconexões. Com o aumento do número de núcleos por chip e número de threads por núcleo, esta diferença entre as latências de comunicação está aumentando. Portanto, é importante mapear as threads de aplicações paralelas levando em conta a comunicação entre elas. Em aplicações paralelas baseadas no paradigma de memória compartilhada, a comunicação é implícita e ocorre através de acessos à variáveis compartilhadas, o que torna difícil a descoberta do padrão de comunicação entre as threads. Mecanismos tradicionais usam simulação para monitorar os acessos à memória realizados pela aplicação, requerendo modificações no código fonte e aumentando drasticamente a sobrecarga. Nesta dissertação de mestrado, são introduzidos dois mecanismos inovadores com uma baixa sobrecarga para se detectar o padrão de comunicação entre threads. O primeiro mecanismo faz uso de informações sobre linhas compartilhadas de caches providas por protocolos de coerência de cache. O segundo mecanismo utiliza a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) para detectar quais páginas de memória cada núcleo está acessando. Ambos os mecanismos dependem totalmente do hardware, o que torna o mapeamento de threads transparente aos programadores e permite que ele seja realizado dinamicamente pelo sistema operacional. Além disto, nenhuma tarefa de alta sobrecarga, como simulação, é requerida. As propostas foram avaliadas com o NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), obtendo representações precisas dos padrões de comunicação. Mapeamentos para as threads foram gerados utilizando os padrões de comunicação descobertos e um algoritmo de mapeamento. O problema do mapeamento é NP-Difícil. Portanto, de forma a se atingir uma complexidade polinomial, o algoritmo empregado é heurístico, baseado no algoritmo de emparelhamento de grafos de Edmonds. Executando as aplicações com o mapeamento resultou em um ganho de desempenho de até 15; 3%. O número de faltas na cache, invalidações em linhas de cache e transações de espionagem foram reduzidos em até 31; 9%, 41% e 65; 4%, respectivamente. / The threads of parallel applications cooperate in order to fulfill their tasks, thereby communication is performed among themselves. The communication latency between the cores in a multiprocessor architecture differs depending on the memory hierarchy and the interconnections. With the increase in the number of cores per chip and the number of threads per core, this difference between the communication latencies is increasing. Therefore, it is important to map the threads of parallel applications taking into account the communication between them. In parallel applications based on the shared memory paradigm, the communication is implicit and occurs through accesses to shared variables, which makes difficult to detect the communication pattern between the threads. Traditional approaches use simulation to monitor the memory accesses performed by the application, requiring modifications to the source code and drastically increasing the overhead. In this master thesis, we introduce two novel light-weight mechanisms to find the communication pattern of threads. The first mechanism makes use of the information about shared cache lines provided by cache coherence protocols. The second mechanism makes use of the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) to detect which memory pages each core is accessing. Both our mechanisms rely entirely on hardware features, which makes the thread mapping transparent to the programmer and allows it to be performed dynamically by the operating system. Moreover, no time consuming task, such as simulation, is required. We evaluated our mechanisms with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and obtained accurate representations of the communication patterns. We generated thread mappings from the detected communication patterns using a mapping algorithm. Mapping is a NP-Hard problem. Therefore, in order to achieve a polynomial complexity, we designed a heuristic method based on the Edmonds graph matching algorithm. Running the applications with these mappings resulted in performance improvements of up to 15.3% compared to the original scheduler of the operating system. The number of cache misses, cache line invalidations and snoop transactions were reduced by up to 31.9%, 41% and 65.4%, respectively.

As threads de aplicações paralelas cooperam a fim de cumprir suas tarefas, dessa forma, comunicação é realizada entre elas. A latência de comunicação entre os núcleos em arquiteturas multiprocessadas diferem dependendo da hierarquia de memória e das interconexões. Com o aumento do número de núcleos por chip e número de threads por núcleo, esta diferença entre as latências de comunicação está aumentando. Portanto, é importante mapear as threads de aplicações paralelas levando em conta a comunicação entre elas. Em aplicações paralelas baseadas no paradigma de memória compartilhada, a comunicação é implícita e ocorre através de acessos à variáveis compartilhadas, o que torna difícil a descoberta do padrão de comunicação entre as threads. Mecanismos tradicionais usam simulação para monitorar os acessos à memória realizados pela aplicação, requerendo modificações no código fonte e aumentando drasticamente a sobrecarga. Nesta dissertação de mestrado, são introduzidos dois mecanismos inovadores com uma baixa sobrecarga para se detectar o padrão de comunicação entre threads. O primeiro mecanismo faz uso de informações sobre linhas compartilhadas de caches providas por protocolos de coerência de cache. O segundo mecanismo utiliza a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) para detectar quais páginas de memória cada núcleo está acessando. Ambos os mecanismos dependem totalmente do hardware, o que torna o mapeamento de threads transparente aos programadores e permite que ele seja realizado dinamicamente pelo sistema operacional. Além disto, nenhuma tarefa de alta sobrecarga, como simulação, é requerida. As propostas foram avaliadas com o NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), obtendo representações precisas dos padrões de comunicação. Mapeamentos para as threads foram gerados utilizando os padrões de comunicação descobertos e um algoritmo de mapeamento. O problema do mapeamento é NP-Difícil. Portanto, de forma a se atingir uma complexidade polinomial, o algoritmo empregado é heurístico, baseado no algoritmo de emparelhamento de grafos de Edmonds. Executando as aplicações com o mapeamento resultou em um ganho de desempenho de até 15; 3%. O número de faltas na cache, invalidações em linhas de cache e transações de espionagem foram reduzidos em até 31; 9%, 41% e 65; 4%, respectivamente. / The threads of parallel applications cooperate in order to fulfill their tasks, thereby communication is performed among themselves. The communication latency between the cores in a multiprocessor architecture differs depending on the memory hierarchy and the interconnections. With the increase in the number of cores per chip and the number of threads per core, this difference between the communication latencies is increasing. Therefore, it is important to map the threads of parallel applications taking into account the communication between them. In parallel applications based on the shared memory paradigm, the communication is implicit and occurs through accesses to shared variables, which makes difficult to detect the communication pattern between the threads. Traditional approaches use simulation to monitor the memory accesses performed by the application, requiring modifications to the source code and drastically increasing the overhead. In this master thesis, we introduce two novel light-weight mechanisms to find the communication pattern of threads. The first mechanism makes use of the information about shared cache lines provided by cache coherence protocols. The second mechanism makes use of the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) to detect which memory pages each core is accessing. Both our mechanisms rely entirely on hardware features, which makes the thread mapping transparent to the programmer and allows it to be performed dynamically by the operating system. Moreover, no time consuming task, such as simulation, is required. We evaluated our mechanisms with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and obtained accurate representations of the communication patterns. We generated thread mappings from the detected communication patterns using a mapping algorithm. Mapping is a NP-Hard problem. Therefore, in order to achieve a polynomial complexity, we designed a heuristic method based on the Edmonds graph matching algorithm. Running the applications with these mappings resulted in performance improvements of up to 15.3% compared to the original scheduler of the operating system. The number of cache misses, cache line invalidations and snoop transactions were reduced by up to 31.9%, 41% and 65.4%, respectively.

Systems for high performance computing are getting increasingly complex. On the one hand, the number of processors is increasing. On the other hand, the individual processors are getting more and more powerful. In recent years, the latter is to a large extent achieved by increasing the number of cores per processor. Unfortunately, scientific applications often fail to fully utilize the available computational performance. Therefore, performance analysis tools that help to localize and fix performance problems are indispensable. Large scale systems for high performance computing typically consist of multiple compute nodes that are connected via network. Performance analysis tools that analyze performance problems that arise from using multiple nodes are readily available. However, the increasing number of cores per processor that can be observed within the last decade represents a major change in the node architecture. Therefore, this work concentrates on the analysis of the node performance. The goal of this thesis is to improve the understanding of the achieved application performance on existing hardware. It can be observed that the scaling of parallel applications on multi-core processors differs significantly from the scaling on multiple processors. Therefore, the properties of shared resources in contemporary multi-core processors as well as remote accesses in multi-processor systems are investigated and their respective impact on the application performance is analyzed. As a first step, a comprehensive suite of highly optimized micro-benchmarks is developed. These benchmarks are able to determine the performance of memory accesses depending on the location and coherence state of the data. They are used to perform an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of memory accesses in contemporary multi-processor systems, which identifies potential bottlenecks. However, in order to localize performance problems, it also has to be determined to which extend the application performance is limited by certain resources. Therefore, a methodology to derive metrics for the utilization of individual components in the memory hierarchy as well as waiting times caused by memory accesses is developed in the second step. The approach is based on hardware performance counters, which record the number of certain hardware events. The developed micro-benchmarks are used to selectively stress individual components, which can be used to identify the events that provide a reasonable assessment for the utilization of the respective component and the amount of time that is spent waiting for memory accesses to complete. Finally, the knowledge gained from this process is used to implement a visualization of memory related performance issues in existing performance analysis tools. The results of the micro-benchmarks reveal that the increasing number of cores per processor and the usage of multiple processors per node leads to complex systems with vastly different performance characteristics of memory accesses depending on the location of the accessed data. Furthermore, it can be observed that the aggregated throughput of shared resources in multi-core processors does not necessarily scale linearly with the number of cores that access them concurrently, which limits the scalability of parallel applications. It is shown that the proposed methodology for the identification of meaningful hardware performance counters yields useful metrics for the localization of memory related performance limitations.