The Thrifty Barrier: Energy-Aware Synchronization in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

Abstract

Much research has been devoted to making microprocessors energy-efficient. However, little attention has been paid to multiprocessor environments where, due to the cooperative nature of the computation, the most energy-efficient execution in each processor may not translate into the most energy-efficient overall execution. We present the thrifty barrier, a hardware-software approach to saving energy in parallel applications that exhibit barrier synchronization imbalance. Threads that arrive early to a thrifty barrier pick among existing low-power processor sleep states based on predicted barrier stall time and other factors. We leverage the coherence protocol and propose small hardware extensions to achieve timely wake-up of these dormant threads, maximizing energy savings while minimizing the impact on performance.