Efficient Execution of Bursty Applications

Abstract

The performance of user-facing applications is critical to client platforms. Many of these applications are event-driven and exhibit "bursty" behavior: the application is generally idle but generates bursts of activity in response to human interaction. We study one example of a bursty application, web-browsers, and produce two important insights:(1) Activity bursts contain false parallelism, bringing many cores out of a deep sleep to inefficiently render a single webpage, and (2) these bursts are highly compute driven, and thus scale nearly linearly with frequency. We show average performance gains/energy reductions of 14%/17% respectively on real hardware by statically moving threads from multiple cores to a single core. We then propose dynamic hardware driven thread migration and scheduling enhancements that detect these bursts, leading to further benefits.

A survey of techniques for improving efficiency of mobile web browsing

“…Objective Energy 3,10,13,14,16,17,24,27,30,[60][61][62][63] Webpage loading time 3,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]16,17,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]33,34,36,38,40,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]51,52,[56][57][58]61,[64][65][66]…”

“…In this section, we discuss works that evaluate browser applications on different processor architectures (Section 6.1); propose DVFS, power gating, and asymmetric multicore scheduling (Section 6.2); perform intelligent scheduling of browser threads to cores (Section 6.3); and propose hardware customization (Section 6.4) and QoS abstractions (Section 6.5) for MWB. Power gating 46,50,52,59 Using extra hardware to operate on different properties of the ''style'' kernel in parallel 44 Thread/task scheduling [37][38][39][46][47][48][50][51][52]59 Basis of Thread/Task Scheduling Smart app (involving user interaction) vs maintenance functions 50,59 Critical (which impact PLT) vs noncritical threads 46,52 Long-lived vs short-lived threads 48 Task latency and/or deadline considerations [37][38][39]47 Power considerations 14,23 Thermal considerations 47 Functionalities of processing units 39 Consolidating threads on few cores to remove false parallelism 48…”

“…Hashemi et al noted that bursty programs such as web browsers are mostly idle, but they trigger the burst of processor activity in response to a user action, and then, they become idle again. Furthermore, due to their much larger instruction cache footprints and much longer timescale of execution, bursty programs show much different characteristics than typical CPU workloads.…”

Inter-Org Sys

“…Gauging the thread behavior of the browser to the event typed in web-browsers is generally obscured but can be looped for a reasonable conclusion (Milad et al, 2016). The networked Organizational Internet of Things (OIoT) is for the flexible use of a consumer who can secure economic efficiency with reduced transaction costs and realize transaction stability from opportunistic threats (Kyung et al, 2010).…”