多核处理器架构的改良

Design Space Exploration: Multi Core  

Instruction

In this assignment, I map an application onto a multi-core X86 platform simulated by Snipersim. The goal is to optimize for Energy-Delay-Area-Product (EDAP). The application I am using is the same EEG application as we used for the single core assignment but this time will look at running the application at a multicore processor. In order to do this I will use Snipersim to simulate the processor.

Step 1: Find the parallel region. 

The first step is to find the parallel region. At first I used the syntax #pragma omp parallel for, but it seems that the the for loop is run for multi times. Maybe because there are some recursive calculations or calculation in one thread needs operands from other threads.Then I tried the section syntax and put for loop into several sections, then it works.

Then I tried to find the parallel region in the main.c at first. But the main.c structure is very simple and I couldn’t find any parallel region that can improve the EDAP sharply. But I found a region can be run parallel, but it can only decrease the delay slightly.  Then I gave two cores for this region,because if gave it more cores, the overheads will exceed the improvement by the parallel.

Then I found that the main.c include the Analysis.h and graphics.h, I think that I have a better chance to find parallel regions in the Analysis.c and graphics.c. In the Analysis.c there is a largefor loop, then I think it can improve the performance a lot if I can parallel this region. After some small change of the codes, it works and reduce the delay sharply, thought it gave us worse EDAP performance, and I

think it can be fixed in the following steps. What’s even better is that the instructions are evenly allocated to different cores, the master core only run a little bit more instructions than other cores. 

Then I worked on graphic.c , fft.c andother documents (we can see some of the efforts in the program comment), but Icouldn’t find any other parallel regions.

    

Step2: decide the number ofcores

Then I tried to decide how many cores to use. I tested 1 core, 4 cores, 8 cores and 16 cores. And we can see the result from Figure 1, the EDAP is increased as the core number increased almost linearly. It seems that more cores means higher EDAP, but it may because that we haven’t optimize the architecture for multi-cores. We cannot draw any conclusion from this figure, so I decided to do some optimization first and hopeful we can get some more meaningful results.

                               

 

Figure 1: EDAP vs core number