Load Balancing of Parallel Tasks using Memory Bandwidth Restrictions

Shared resource contention is a significant problem in multi-core systems and can have a negative impact on the system. Memory contention occurs when the different cores in a processor access the same memory resource, resulting in a conflict. It is possible to limit memory contention through resource reservation where a part of the system or an application is reserved a partition of the shared resource. We investigated how applying memory bandwidth restrictions using MemGuard can aid in synchronizing execution times of parallel tasks. We further investigate when memory bandwidth restrictions are applicable. We conduct three experiments to investigate when bandwidth restrictions are applicable. Firstly, we conducted an experiment to pinpoint when the memory bandwidth saturates a core. Secondly, we investigated our adaptive memory partitioning scheme performance against static and no partitioning. Finally, we tested how our adaptive partitioning scheme and static partitioning can isolate a workload against an interfering memory intensive workload running on a separate core. As the experiments only were conducted on one system, pinpointing the general point of contention was difficult, seeing that it can differ significantly from system to system. Through our experiments, we see that memory bandwidth partitioning has the ability to decrease the execution time of feature detection algorithms, which means that memory bandwidth partitioning potentially can help threads to reach their synchronization points simultaneously