IEEE Spectrum November, 2016 - 16

NEwS

INTEGRATED
Engineering
Software
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204.632.5636
16

NOV 2016

INTEGRATEDSOFT.COM
NORTh AMERICAN

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

BreakiNg
the multicore
BottleNeck
Simple hardware speeds
core-to-core communication
To p r e v e n t t h e c o r e s
Engineers at North
Carolina State Univer- f rom wa ntonly over w ritsity and at Intel have come ing one another's informaup with a solution to one of tion, processing data out of
the modern microprocessor's order, or committing other
most persistent problems: errors, multicore procescommunication among the sors use lock-protected softprocessor's many cores. Their ware queues. These are data
answer is a dedicated set of structures that coordinate
logic circuits they call the the movement of and access
Queue Management Device, to information according to
or QMD. In simulations, inte- software-defined rules. But
grating the QMD with the pro- all that extra software comes
cessor's on-chip network at a with significant overhead,
minimum doubled core-to- which only gets worse as the
core communication speed number of cores increases.
and, in some cases, boosted "Communications between
it much further. Even bet- cores is becoming a bottleter, as the number of cores neck," says Yan Solihin, a
was increased, the speedup professor of electrical and
computer engineering who
became more pronounced.
In the last decade, micro- led the work at NC State, in
processor designers started Raleigh.
The solution-born of a disputting multiple copies of processor cores on a single die as cussion with Intel engineers
a way to continue the rate of and executed by Solihin's
performance improvement student, Yipeng Wang, at
computer makers had enjoyed NC State and at Intel-was
without causing chip-killing to turn the software queue
hot spots to form on the CPU. into hardware. This effecBut that solution comes with tively turned three multistep
complications. For one, it software-queue operations
means that software programs into three simple instruchave to be written so that work tions: Add data to the queue,
is divided among processor take data from the queue,
cores. The result: Sometimes and put data close to where
different cores need to work it's going to be needed next.
on the same data or must coor- Compared with just using the
dinate the passing of data from software solution, the QMD
sped up a sample task such as
one core to another.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2016