Acceleration of Parallel Applications by Moving Code Instead of Data

After the performance improvement rate in single-core processors decreased in 2000s, most CPU manufacturers have steered towards parallel computing. Parallel computing has been in the spotlight for a while now. Several hardware and software innovations are being examined and developed, in order to improve the efficiency of parallel computing. Signal processing is an important application area of parallel computing, and this makes parallel computing interesting for Ericsson AB, a company that among other business areas, is mainly focusing on communication technologies. The Ericsson baseband research team at Lindholmen, has been developing a small, experimental basic operating system (BOS) for research purposes within the area of parallel computing. One major overhead in parallel applications, which increases the latency in applications, is the communication overhead between the cores. It had been observed that in some signal processing applications, it is common for some tasks of the parallel application to have a large data size but a small code size. The question was risen then, could it be beneficial to move code instead of data in such cases, to reduce the communication overhead. In this thesis work the gain and practical difficulties of moving code are investigated through implementation. A method has been successfully developed and integrated into BOS to move the code between the cores on a multi-core architecture. While it can be a very specific class of applications in which it is useful to move code, it is shown that it is possible to move the code between the cores with zero extra overhead