ACAL Seminar Nov 9

[Thomas Bartold]

ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE LABORATORY
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
University of Michigan ACAL Seminar
Thursday, November 9, 3:30 - 5:00 PM 1005 EECS
North Campus, University of Michigan

"Thread-level parallelism and Interactive Performance
of Desktop Applications"
By
Kris Flautner

Abstract: Multiprocessing is already prevalent in servers where multiple
clients present an obvious source of thread-level parallelism. However, the
case for multiprocessing is less clear for desktop applications.
Nevertheless, architects are designing processors that count on the
availability of thread-level parallelism. Unlike server workloads, the
primary requirement of interactive applications is to respond to user events
under human perception bounds rather than to maximize end-to-end throughput.
In this paper we report on the thread-level parallelism and interactive
response time of a variety of desktop applications. By tracking the
communication between tasks, we can focus our measurements on the portions
of the benchmark's execution that have the greatest impact on the user. We
find that running our benchmark's on a dual-processor machine improves
response time of mouse-click events by as much as 36%, and 22% on
average—out of a maximum possible 50%. The benefits of multiprocessing are
even more apparent when background tasks are considered. In our experiments,
running a simple MP3 playback program in the background increases response
time by 14% on a uniprocessor while it only increases the response time on a
dual processor by 4%. When response times are fast enough for further
improvements to be imperceptible, the increased idle time after interactive
episodes could be exploited to build systems that are more power efficient.

Thursday, November 9, 2000 3:30 - 5:00 PM
Room 1005 EECS
North Campus, University of Michigan