The prevalence of multi-core processors with recent advancement in virtualization technologies has enabled horizontal and vertical scaling within a physical node achieving economical sharing of computing infrastructures as computing clouds. Through hardware virtualization, consolidated servers each with specific number of core allotment run on the same physical node in dedicated Virtual Machines (VMs) to increase overall node utilization which increases profit by reducing operational costs. Unfortunately, despite the conceptual simplicity of vertical and horizontal scaling in virtualized cloud environments, leveraging the full potential of this technology has presented significant scalability challenges in practice. One of the fundamental problems is the performance unpredictability in virtualized cloud environments (ranked fifth in the top 10 obstacles for growth of cloud computing). In this dissertation, we present two case studies in vertical and horizontal scaling to this challenging problem. For the first case study, we describe concrete experimental evidence that shows important source of performance variations: mapping of virtual CPU to physical cores. We then conduct an experimental comparative study of three major hypervisors (i.e., VMware, KVM, Xen) with regard to their support of n-tier applications running on multi-core processor. For the second case study, we present empirical study that shows memory thrashing caused by interference among consolidated VMs is a significant source of performance interference that hampers horizontal scalability of an n-tier application performance. We then execute transient event analyses of fine-grained experiment data that link very short bottlenecks with memory thrashing to the very long response time (VLRT) requests. Furthermore we provide three practical techniques such as VM migration, memory reallocation, soft resource allocation and show that they can mitigate the effects of performance interference among consolidate VMs.

The continuing requirement for computational processing power, multi-functional devices and component miniaturization have emphasised the need for thermal management systems able to maintain the temperature at safe operating condition. The thermal management industry is constantly seeking for new cutting edge, efficient, cost effective heat transfer enhancement technologies. The aim of this study is to utilize the electron beam treatment for the improvement of the heat transfer area in liquid cooled plates and experimentally evaluate the performance. Considering the complexity of the technology, this thesis focuses on the design and production of electron beam enhanced test samples, construction of the test facility, testing procedure and evaluation of thermal and hydraulic characteristics. In particular, the current research presented in this thesis contains a number of challenging and cutting edge technological developments that include: (1) an overview of the semiconductor industry, cooling requirements, the market of thermal management systems, (2) an integral literature review of pin-fin enhancement technology, (3) design and fabrication of the electron beam enhanced test samples, (4) upgrade and construction of the experimental test rig and the development of the test procedure, (5) reduction of the experimental data and analysis to evaluate thermal and hydraulic performance. The experimental results show that the capability of the electron beam treatment to improve the thermal efficiency of current untreated liquid cooled plates is approximately three times. The highest heat transfer rate was observed for the sample S3; this is attributed to the irregularities of the enhanced structure, which improves the heat transfer area, mixing, and disturbs the thermal and velocity boundary layers. Enhancement of heat transfer for all three samples was characterised by an increase of pressure drop. The electron beam enhancement technique is a rapid process with zero material waste and cost effective. It allows thermal management systems to be produced smaller and faster, reduce material usage, without compromising safety, labour cost or the environment.

A hybrid of message passing and shared memory techniques is presented for scalable parallelization of the adaptive integral method (AIM), an FFT based algorithm, on clusters of identical multi-core processors. The proposed hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelization scheme is based on a nested one-dimensional (1-D) slab decomposition of the 3-D auxiliary uniform grid and the associated AIM calculations: If there are M processors and T cores per processor, the scheme (i) divides the uniform grid into M slabs and MT sub-slabs, (ii) assigns each slab/sub-slab and the associated operations to one of the processors/cores, and (iii) uses MPI for inter-processor data communication and OpenMP for intra-processor data exchange. The MPI/OpenMP parallel AIM is used to accelerate the MOM solution of combined-field integral equations pertinent to the analysis of scattering from perfectly conducting surfaces. The scalability and efficiency of the implementation are investigated theoretically and verified numerically by solving benchmark scattering problems on a (near) petaflop supercomputing cluster of quad-core processors. The timing and speedup results on up to 1024 processors show that the proposed hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelization exhibits better strong scalability (fixed problem size speedup) compared to pure MPI parallelization when multiple cores are used on each processor. / text

No atual contexto de inovações em multi-core, em que as novas tecnologias de integração estão fornecendo um número crescente de transistores por chip, o estudo de técnicas de aumento de vazão de dados é de suma importância para os atuais e futuros processadores multi-core e many-core. Com a contínua demanda por desempenho computacional, as memórias cache vêm sendo largamente adotadas nos diversos tipos de projetos arquiteturais de computadores. Os atuais processadores disponíveis no mercado apontam na direção do uso de memórias cache L2 compartilhadas. No entanto, ainda não está claro quais os ganhos e custos inerentes desses modelos de compartilhamento da memória cache. Assim, nota-se a importância de estudos que abordem os diversos aspectos do compartilhamento de memória cache em processadores com múltiplos núcleos. Portanto, essa dissertação visa avaliar diferentes compartilhamentos de memória cache, modelando e aplicando cargas de trabalho sobre as diferentes organizações, a fim de obter resultados significativos sobre o desempenho e a influência do compartilhamento da memória cache em processadores multi-core. Para isso, foram avaliados diversos compartilhamentos de memória cache, utilizando técnicas tradicionais de aumento de desempenho, como aumento da associatividade, maior tamanho de linha, maior tamanho de memória cache e também aumento no número de níveis de memória cache, investigando a correlação entre essas arquiteturas de memória cache e os diversos tipos de aplicações da carga de trabalho. Os resultados mostram a importância da integração entre os projetos de arquitetura de memória cache e o projeto físico da memória, a fim de obter o melhor equilíbrio entre tempo de acesso à memória cache e redução de faltas de dados. Nota-se nos resultados, dentro do espaço de projeto avaliado, que devido às limitações físicas e de desempenho, as organizações 1Core/L2 e 2Cores/L2, com tamanho total igual a 32 MB (bancos de 2 MB compartilhados), tamanho de linha igual a 128 bytes, representam uma boa escolha de implementação física em sistemas de propósito geral, obtendo um bom desempenho em todas aplicações avaliadas sem grandes sobrecustos de ocupação de área e consumo de energia. Além disso, como conclusão desta dissertação, mostra-se que, para as atuais e futuras tecnologias de integração, as tradicionais técnicas de ganho de desempenho obtidas com modificações na memória cache, como aumento do tamanho das memórias, incremento da associatividade, maiores tamanhos da linha, etc. não devem apresentar ganhos reais de desempenho caso o acréscimo de latência gerado por essas técnicas não seja reduzido, a fim de equilibrar entre a redução na taxa de faltas de dados e o tempo de acesso aos dados. / In the current context of innovations in multi-core processors, where the new integration technologies are providing an increasing number of transistors inside chip, the study of techniques for increasing data throughput has great importance for the current and future multi-core and many-core processors. With the continuous demand for performance, the cache memories have been widely adopted in various types of architectural designs of computers. Nowadays, processors on the market point out for the use of shared L2 cache memory. However, it is not clear the gains and costs of these shared cache memory models. Thus, studies that address different aspects of shared cache memory have great importance in context of multi-core processors. Therefore, this dissertation aims to evaluate different shared cache memory, modeling and applying workloads on different organizations in order to obtain significant results from the performance and the influence of the shared cache memory multi-core processors. Thus, several types of shared cache memory were evaluated using traditional techniques to increase performance, such as increasing the associativity, larger line size, larger cache memory and also the increase on the cache memory hierarchy, investigating the correlation between the cache memory architecture and the workload applications. The results show the importance of integration between cache memory architecture project and memory physical design in order to obtain the best trade-off between cache memory access time and cache misses. According to the results, within evaluations, due to physical limitations and performance, organizations 1Core/L2 and 2Cores/L2 with total cache size equal to 32MB, using banks of 2 MB, line size equal to 128 bytes, represent a good choice for physical implementation in general purpose systems, obtaining a good performance in all evaluated applications without major extra costs of area occupation and power consumption. Furthermore, as a conclusion in this dissertation is shown that, for current and future integration technologies, traditional techniques for performance gain obtained with changes in the cache memory such as, increase of the memory size, increasing the associativity, larger line sizes etc.. should not lead to real performance gains if the additional latency generated by these techniques was not treated, in order to balance between the reduction of cache miss rate and the data access time.

No atual contexto de inovações em multi-core, em que as novas tecnologias de integração estão fornecendo um número crescente de transistores por chip, o estudo de técnicas de aumento de vazão de dados é de suma importância para os atuais e futuros processadores multi-core e many-core. Com a contínua demanda por desempenho computacional, as memórias cache vêm sendo largamente adotadas nos diversos tipos de projetos arquiteturais de computadores. Os atuais processadores disponíveis no mercado apontam na direção do uso de memórias cache L2 compartilhadas. No entanto, ainda não está claro quais os ganhos e custos inerentes desses modelos de compartilhamento da memória cache. Assim, nota-se a importância de estudos que abordem os diversos aspectos do compartilhamento de memória cache em processadores com múltiplos núcleos. Portanto, essa dissertação visa avaliar diferentes compartilhamentos de memória cache, modelando e aplicando cargas de trabalho sobre as diferentes organizações, a fim de obter resultados significativos sobre o desempenho e a influência do compartilhamento da memória cache em processadores multi-core. Para isso, foram avaliados diversos compartilhamentos de memória cache, utilizando técnicas tradicionais de aumento de desempenho, como aumento da associatividade, maior tamanho de linha, maior tamanho de memória cache e também aumento no número de níveis de memória cache, investigando a correlação entre essas arquiteturas de memória cache e os diversos tipos de aplicações da carga de trabalho. Os resultados mostram a importância da integração entre os projetos de arquitetura de memória cache e o projeto físico da memória, a fim de obter o melhor equilíbrio entre tempo de acesso à memória cache e redução de faltas de dados. Nota-se nos resultados, dentro do espaço de projeto avaliado, que devido às limitações físicas e de desempenho, as organizações 1Core/L2 e 2Cores/L2, com tamanho total igual a 32 MB (bancos de 2 MB compartilhados), tamanho de linha igual a 128 bytes, representam uma boa escolha de implementação física em sistemas de propósito geral, obtendo um bom desempenho em todas aplicações avaliadas sem grandes sobrecustos de ocupação de área e consumo de energia. Além disso, como conclusão desta dissertação, mostra-se que, para as atuais e futuras tecnologias de integração, as tradicionais técnicas de ganho de desempenho obtidas com modificações na memória cache, como aumento do tamanho das memórias, incremento da associatividade, maiores tamanhos da linha, etc. não devem apresentar ganhos reais de desempenho caso o acréscimo de latência gerado por essas técnicas não seja reduzido, a fim de equilibrar entre a redução na taxa de faltas de dados e o tempo de acesso aos dados. / In the current context of innovations in multi-core processors, where the new integration technologies are providing an increasing number of transistors inside chip, the study of techniques for increasing data throughput has great importance for the current and future multi-core and many-core processors. With the continuous demand for performance, the cache memories have been widely adopted in various types of architectural designs of computers. Nowadays, processors on the market point out for the use of shared L2 cache memory. However, it is not clear the gains and costs of these shared cache memory models. Thus, studies that address different aspects of shared cache memory have great importance in context of multi-core processors. Therefore, this dissertation aims to evaluate different shared cache memory, modeling and applying workloads on different organizations in order to obtain significant results from the performance and the influence of the shared cache memory multi-core processors. Thus, several types of shared cache memory were evaluated using traditional techniques to increase performance, such as increasing the associativity, larger line size, larger cache memory and also the increase on the cache memory hierarchy, investigating the correlation between the cache memory architecture and the workload applications. The results show the importance of integration between cache memory architecture project and memory physical design in order to obtain the best trade-off between cache memory access time and cache misses. According to the results, within evaluations, due to physical limitations and performance, organizations 1Core/L2 and 2Cores/L2 with total cache size equal to 32MB, using banks of 2 MB, line size equal to 128 bytes, represent a good choice for physical implementation in general purpose systems, obtaining a good performance in all evaluated applications without major extra costs of area occupation and power consumption. Furthermore, as a conclusion in this dissertation is shown that, for current and future integration technologies, traditional techniques for performance gain obtained with changes in the cache memory such as, increase of the memory size, increasing the associativity, larger line sizes etc.. should not lead to real performance gains if the additional latency generated by these techniques was not treated, in order to balance between the reduction of cache miss rate and the data access time.

No atual contexto de inovações em multi-core, em que as novas tecnologias de integração estão fornecendo um número crescente de transistores por chip, o estudo de técnicas de aumento de vazão de dados é de suma importância para os atuais e futuros processadores multi-core e many-core. Com a contínua demanda por desempenho computacional, as memórias cache vêm sendo largamente adotadas nos diversos tipos de projetos arquiteturais de computadores. Os atuais processadores disponíveis no mercado apontam na direção do uso de memórias cache L2 compartilhadas. No entanto, ainda não está claro quais os ganhos e custos inerentes desses modelos de compartilhamento da memória cache. Assim, nota-se a importância de estudos que abordem os diversos aspectos do compartilhamento de memória cache em processadores com múltiplos núcleos. Portanto, essa dissertação visa avaliar diferentes compartilhamentos de memória cache, modelando e aplicando cargas de trabalho sobre as diferentes organizações, a fim de obter resultados significativos sobre o desempenho e a influência do compartilhamento da memória cache em processadores multi-core. Para isso, foram avaliados diversos compartilhamentos de memória cache, utilizando técnicas tradicionais de aumento de desempenho, como aumento da associatividade, maior tamanho de linha, maior tamanho de memória cache e também aumento no número de níveis de memória cache, investigando a correlação entre essas arquiteturas de memória cache e os diversos tipos de aplicações da carga de trabalho. Os resultados mostram a importância da integração entre os projetos de arquitetura de memória cache e o projeto físico da memória, a fim de obter o melhor equilíbrio entre tempo de acesso à memória cache e redução de faltas de dados. Nota-se nos resultados, dentro do espaço de projeto avaliado, que devido às limitações físicas e de desempenho, as organizações 1Core/L2 e 2Cores/L2, com tamanho total igual a 32 MB (bancos de 2 MB compartilhados), tamanho de linha igual a 128 bytes, representam uma boa escolha de implementação física em sistemas de propósito geral, obtendo um bom desempenho em todas aplicações avaliadas sem grandes sobrecustos de ocupação de área e consumo de energia. Além disso, como conclusão desta dissertação, mostra-se que, para as atuais e futuras tecnologias de integração, as tradicionais técnicas de ganho de desempenho obtidas com modificações na memória cache, como aumento do tamanho das memórias, incremento da associatividade, maiores tamanhos da linha, etc. não devem apresentar ganhos reais de desempenho caso o acréscimo de latência gerado por essas técnicas não seja reduzido, a fim de equilibrar entre a redução na taxa de faltas de dados e o tempo de acesso aos dados. / In the current context of innovations in multi-core processors, where the new integration technologies are providing an increasing number of transistors inside chip, the study of techniques for increasing data throughput has great importance for the current and future multi-core and many-core processors. With the continuous demand for performance, the cache memories have been widely adopted in various types of architectural designs of computers. Nowadays, processors on the market point out for the use of shared L2 cache memory. However, it is not clear the gains and costs of these shared cache memory models. Thus, studies that address different aspects of shared cache memory have great importance in context of multi-core processors. Therefore, this dissertation aims to evaluate different shared cache memory, modeling and applying workloads on different organizations in order to obtain significant results from the performance and the influence of the shared cache memory multi-core processors. Thus, several types of shared cache memory were evaluated using traditional techniques to increase performance, such as increasing the associativity, larger line size, larger cache memory and also the increase on the cache memory hierarchy, investigating the correlation between the cache memory architecture and the workload applications. The results show the importance of integration between cache memory architecture project and memory physical design in order to obtain the best trade-off between cache memory access time and cache misses. According to the results, within evaluations, due to physical limitations and performance, organizations 1Core/L2 and 2Cores/L2 with total cache size equal to 32MB, using banks of 2 MB, line size equal to 128 bytes, represent a good choice for physical implementation in general purpose systems, obtaining a good performance in all evaluated applications without major extra costs of area occupation and power consumption. Furthermore, as a conclusion in this dissertation is shown that, for current and future integration technologies, traditional techniques for performance gain obtained with changes in the cache memory such as, increase of the memory size, increasing the associativity, larger line sizes etc.. should not lead to real performance gains if the additional latency generated by these techniques was not treated, in order to balance between the reduction of cache miss rate and the data access time.

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A large part of today's multi-core chips is interconnect. Increasing communication complexity has made new strategies for interconnects essential such as Network on Chip. Power dissipation in interconnects has become a substantial part of the total power dissipation. Hence, techniques to reduce interconnect power have become a necessity. In this thesis, we present a design methodology that gives values of bus width for interconnect links, frequency of operation for routers, in Network on Chip scenario that satisfy required throughput and dissipate minimal switching power. We develop closed form analytical expressions for the power dissipation, with bus width and frequency as variables and then use Lagrange multiplier method to arrive at the optimal values. To validate our methodology, we implement the router design in 90 nm technology and measure power for various bus widths and frequency combinations. We find that the experimental results are in good agreement with the predicted theoretical results. Further, we present the scenario of an Application Specific System on Chip (ASSoC), where the throughput requirements are different on different links. We show that our analytical model holds in this case also. Then, we present modified version of the solution considered for Chip Multi Processor (CMP) case that can solve the ASSoC scenario also.