• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.301-310
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• 2013

Nowadays, the multicore processor is watched with interest by people all over the world. As the design technology of system on chip has developed, observing and controlling the processor core's internal state has not been easy. Therefore, multicore processor debugging is very difficult and time-consuming. Thus, we need a reliable and efficient debugger to find the bugs. In this paper, we propose an on-chip debug architecture for multicore processors that is easily adaptable and flexible. It is based on the JTAG standard and supports monitoring mode debugging, which is different from run-stop mode debugging. Compared with the debug architecture that supports the run-stop mode debugging, the proposed architecture is easily applied to a debugger and has the advantage of having a desirable gate count and execution cycle. To verify the on-chip debug architecture, it is applied to the debugger of the prototype multicore processor and is tested by interconnecting it with a software debugger based on GDB and configured for the target processor.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.285-299
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• 2013

To enable hard real-time systems to take advantage of multicore processors, it is crucial to obtain the worst-case execution time (WCET) for programs running on multicore processors. However, this is challenging and complicated due to the inter-thread interferences from the shared resources in a multicore processor. Recent research used the combined cache conflict graph (CCCG) to model and compute the worst-case inter-thread interferences on a shared L2 cache in a multicore processor, which is called the CCCG-based approach in this paper. Although it can compute the WCET safely and accurately, its computational complexity is exponential and prohibitive for a large number of cores. In this paper, we propose three counter-based approaches to significantly reduce the complexity of the multicore WCET analysis, while achieving absolute safety with tightness close to the CCCG-based approach. The basic counter-based approach simply counts the worst-case number of cache line blocks mapped to a cache set of a shared L2 cache from all the concurrent threads, and compares it with the associativity of the cache set to compute the worst-case cache behavior. The enhanced counter-based approach uses techniques to enhance the accuracy of calculating the counters. The hybrid counter-based approach combines the enhanced counter-based approach and the CCCG-based approach to further improve the tightness of analysis without significantly increasing the complexity. Our experiments on a 4-core processor indicate that the enhanced counter-based approach overestimates the WCET by 14% on average compared to the CCCG-based approach, while its averaged running time is less than 1/380 that of the CCCG-based approach. The hybrid approach reduces the overestimation to only 2.65%, while its running time is less than 1/150 that of the CCCG-based approach on average.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.9-16
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• 2009

Energy consumption as well as performance should be considered when designing up-to-date multicore processors. In this paper, we propose new design technique to reduce the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by using modified filter cache. The filter cache has been recognized as one of the most energy-efficient design techniques for singlecore processors. The energy consumed in the instruction cache accounts for a significant portion of total processor energy consumption. Therefore, energy-aware instruction cache design techniques are essential to reduce the energy consumption in a multicore processor. The proposed technique reduces the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by reducing the number of accesses to the level-1 instruction cache. We evaluate the proposed design using a simulation infrastructure based on SimpleScalar and CACTI. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture reduces the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by up to 3.4% compared to the conventional filter cache architecture. Moreover, the proposed architecture shows better performance over the conventional filter cache architecture.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.22-29
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• 2014

A lock is a general and popular way of serializing accesses to shared data in multiprocessor environments. After the mutual exclusion was first introduced in 1960s, many spinlock algorithms have been proposed and deployed to real systems such as operating systems and (transactional) database systems. In this study, we measure impacts of a lock mechanism on a database system under various CPU configurations using a high-end multicore system. For the evaluation, we use the most up-to-date version of MySQL (version 5.6) with InnoDB engine, which has been substantially re-architected to improve scalability on multicore machines. We changed the original spinlock function of InnoDB to evaluate various spinlock mechanisms on multicore machines.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.12-25
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• 2012

For real-time systems it is important to obtain the accurate worst-case execution time (WCET). Furthermore, how to improve the WCET of applications that run on multicore processors is both significant and challenging as the WCET can be largely affected by the possible inter-core interferences in shared resources such as the shared L2 cache. In order to solve this problem, we propose an innovative approach that adopts a code positioning method to reduce the inter-core L2 cache interferences between the different real-time threads that adaptively run in a multi-core processor by using different strategies. The worst-case-oriented strategy is designed to decrease the worst-case WCET among these threads to as low as possible. The other two strategies aim at reducing the WCET of each thread to almost equal percentage or amount. Our experiments indicate that the proposed multicore-aware code positioning approaches, not only improve the worst-case performance of the real-time threads but also make good tradeoffs between efficiency and fairness for threads that run on multicore platforms.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.251-256
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• 2017

Recently, multicore processor system is widely adopted not only in general purpose computers but also in embedded systems and mobile devices in order to improve performance. Since the power dissipation issue of multicore processor system is very significant, it must be estimated accurately in the early design stage. In this paper, a fast power analysis tool for a high performance multicore processor based on the trace-driven simulator has been developed. To achieve it, the power dissipation of each hardware unit per core are added. Using SPEC 2000 benchmarks as input, the trace-driven simulation has been performed to estimate the average power dissipation per instruction.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.177-189
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• 2015

High-performance processors using Non-Uniform Cache Architecture (NUCA) are increasingly used to deal with the growing wire delays in multicore/manycore processors. Due to the convergence of high-performance computing with embedded computing, NUCA caches are expected to benefit high-end embedded systems as well. However, for real-time systems that use multicore processors with NUCA caches, it is crucial to bound worst-case execution time (WCET) accurately and safely. In this paper, we developed a WCET analysis approach by considering the effect of static NUCA caches on WCET. We compared the WCET in real-time applications with different topologies of static NUCA caches. Our experimental results demonstrated that the static NUCA cache could improve the worst-case performance of realtime applications using multicore processor compared to the cache with uniform access time.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.267-278
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• 2012

The state-of-the-art techniques in multicore timing analysis are limited to analyze multicores with shared instruction caches only. This paper proposes a uniform framework to analyze the worst-case performance for both shared instruction caches and data caches in a multicore platform. Our approach is based on a new concept called address flow graph, which can be used to model both instruction and data accesses for timing analysis. Our experiments, as a proof-of-concept study, indicate that the proposed approach can accurately compute the worst-case performance for real-time threads running on a dual-core processor with a shared L2 cache (either to store instructions or data).

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38C no.6
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• pp.521-530
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• 2013

This paper proposes a task parallelism system (BioMP) to improve applications' execution time of multicore based mobile device. When application developers append the functions of parallel specification into the existing software, our proposed system supports the parallel processing of threads as well as a compatibility. BioMP improves the software in order that an existing large-scale source can recognize the multicore architecture. From our experiment, our idea improved the execution time of application until about 64% against the existing system in multicore environment based on quad core. In addition, BioMP does not require any additional modification of a mobile platform because BioMP is independent component. Consequently, when application developers release multicore-aware applications into the application store, users can immediately run without any modification of the mobile device.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.16A no.2
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• pp.113-124
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• 2009

With increasing multicore system, much effort has been put on the performance improvement of its application. Because multicore system has multiple processing devices in one system, its processing power increases compared to the single core system. However in many cases the advantages of multicore can not be exploited fully because the existing software and hardware were designed to be suitable for single core. When the existing software runs on multicore, its performance improvement is limited by the bottleneck of sharing resources and the inefficient use of cache memory on multicore. Therefore, according as the number of core increases, it doesn't show performance improvement and shows performance drop in the worst case. In this paper we propose a method of performance improvement of multicore system by applying Flow-Level Parallelism to the existing TCP/IP network application and operating system. The proposed method sets up the execution environment so that each core unit operates independently as much as possible in network application, TCP/IP stack on operating system, device driver, and network interface. Moreover it distributes network traffics to each core unit through L2 switch. The proposed method allows to minimize the sharing of application data, data structure, socket, device driver, and network interface between each core. Also it allows to minimize the competition among cores to take resources and increase the hit ratio of cache. We implemented the proposed methods with 8 core system and performed experiment. Experimental results show that network access speed and bandwidth increase linearly according to the number of core.