BatchQueue: Fast and Memory-thrifty Core to Core Communication

International audienceSequential applications can take advantage of multi-core systems by way of pipeline parallelism to improve their performance. In such parallelism, core to core communication overhead is the main limit of speedup. This paper presents BatchQueue, a fast and memory-thrifty core to core communication system based on batch processing of whole cache line. BatchQueue is able to send a 32bit word of data in just 12.5 ns on a Xeon X5472 and only needs 2 full cache lines plus 3 byte-sized variables -- each on a different cache line for optimal performance -- to work. The characteristics of BatchQueue -- high throughput and increased latency resulting from its batch processing -- makes it well suited for highly communicative tasks with no real time requirements such as monitoring