Golden-Finger and Back-Door: Two HW/SW Mechanisms for Accelerating Multicore Computer Systems

Authors

  • Slo-Li Chu Department of Information and Computer Engineering, Chung-Yuan Christian University

Keywords:

multicore, Xilinx ML310, hardware interprocessor communication

Abstract

Continuously requirements of high-performance computing make the computer system adopt more processors
within a system to improve the parallelism and throughput. Although multiple processing cores are implemented in
a computer system, the complicated hardware communication mechanism between processors will decrease the
performance of overall system. Besides, the unsuitable process scheduling mechanism of conventional operating
system can not fully utilize the computation power of additional processors. Accordingly, this paper provides two
mechanisms to overcome the above challenges by using hardware and software mechanisms, respectively. In
software aspect, we propose a tool, called Golden-Finger, to dynamically adjust the scheduling policy of the process
scheduler in Linux. This software mechanism can improve the performance of the specified process by occupying a
processor solely. In hardware aspect, we design an effective hardware mechanism, called Back-Door, to
communicate two independent processors which can not be operated together, such as the dual PowerPC 405 cores
in the Xilinx ML310 system. The experimental results reveal that the two mechanisms can obtain significant
performance enhancements.

References

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Published

2012-01-01

How to Cite

[1]
S.-L. Chu, “Golden-Finger and Back-Door: Two HW/SW Mechanisms for Accelerating Multicore Computer Systems”, Int. j. eng. technol. innov., vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 72–84, Jan. 2012.

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2012)

Section

Articles

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