Energy Efficient Spin-Locking in Multi-Core Machines

Salvatore Rivieccio



pdf Download PDF

Abstract:
In this thesis I will show an implementation of spin-locks that works in an energy efficient fashion, exploiting the capability of last generation hardware and new software components in order to rise or reduce the CPU frequency when running spinlock operation. In particular this work consists in a linux kernel module and a user-space program that make possible to run with the lowest frequency admissible when a thread is spin-locking, waiting to enter a critical section. These changes are thread-grain, which means that only interested threads are affected whereas the system keeps running as usual. Standard libraries’ spinlocks do not provide energy efficiency support, those kind of optimizations are related to the application behaviors or to kernel-level solutions, like governors.

BibTeX Entry:

@mastersthesis{tRivi17,
author = {Rivieccio, Salvatore},
school = {Sapienza, University of Rome},
title = {Energy Efficient Spin-Locking in Multi-Core Machines},
year = {2017},
type = {mathesis},
comment = {Supervisor: F. Quaglia - Co-Supervisor: P. Di Sanzo}
}