Providing High and Controllable Performance in Multicore Systems Through Shared Resource Management

Multiple applications executing concurrently on a multicore system interfere with each other at different shared resources such as main memory and shared caches. Such inter-application interference, if uncontrolled, results in high system performance degradation and unpredictable application slowdowns. While previous work has proposed application-aware memory scheduling as a solution to mitigate inter-application interference and improve system performance, previously proposed memory scheduling techniques incur high hardware complexity and unfairly slowdown some applications. Furthermore, previously proposed memory-interference mitigation techniques are not designed to precisely control application performance. This dissertation seeks to achieve high and controllable performance in multicore systems by mitigating and quantifying the impact of shared resource interference. First, towards mitigating memory interference and achieving high performance, we propose the Blacklisting memory scheduler. We observe that ranking applications individually with a total order based on memory access characteristics, like previous schedulers do, leads to high hardware cost, while also causing unfair application slowdowns. The Blacklisting memory scheduler overcomes these shortcomings based on two key observations. First, we observe that, to mitigate interference, it is sufficient to separate applications into only two groups, one containing applications that are vulnerable to interference and another containing applications that cause interference, instead of ranking individual applications with a total order. Vulnerable-to-interference group is prioritized over the interference-causing group. Second, we show that this grouping can be efficiently performed by simply counting the number of consecutive requests served from each application – an application that has a large number of consecutive requests served is dynamically classified as interference-