Self-organizing Core Allocation

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of dynamic allocation of cores to parallel applications on homogeneous many-core systems such as, for example, MultiProcessor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs). For a given number of thread-parallel applications, the goal is to find a core assignment that maximizes the average speedup. However, the difficulty is that some applications may have a higher speedup variation than others when assigned additional cores. This paper first presents a centralized algorithm to calculate an optimal assignment for the above objective. However, as the number of cores and the dynamics of applications will significantly increase in the future, decentralized concepts are necessary to scale with this development. Therefore, a decentralized (self-organizing) algorithm is developed in order to minimize the amount of global information that has to be exchanged between applications. The experimental results show that this approach can reach the optimal result of the centralized version in average by 98.95%.