Virtual Aggregated Processor in Multi-core Computers

Abstract

Parallel computing has been in the spotlight with the advent of multi-core computers. The popular multithreading model does not scale very well when there are hundreds or thousands of cores, since it can only help exploit coarse-grained parallelism. There exist a lot of fine-grained parallelism to be exploited in I/O tasks and memory accesses during execution of a thread. Our counter-Amdahl's law tells us that it is more effective to parallelize the serial fraction of a parallel algorithm rather than the parallelized fraction in order to maximize the speedup. In this paper, we have proposed a virtual aggregated processor that is aiming at speeding up execution of a thread through exploiting the fine-grained parallelism in I/O tasks and memory accesses. We have proposed and implemented two techniques, helper thread and I/O specialization, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the virtual aggregated processor technology.