TriKon: A hypervisor aware manycore processor

Abstract

Virtualization is increasingly being deployed to run applications in a cloud computing environment. Sadly, there are overheads associated with hypervisors that can prohibitively reduce application performance. A major source of the overheads is the destructive interference between the application, OS, and hypervisor in the memory system. We characterize such overheads in this paper, and propose the design of a novel Triangle cache that can effectively mitigate destructive interference across these three classes of workloads. We subsequently, proceed to design the TriKon manycore processor that consists of a set of heterogeneous cores with caches of different sizes, and Triangle caches. To maximize the throughput of the system as a whole, we propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm for scheduling a class of system and CPU intensive applications on the set of heterogeneous cores. The area of the TriKon processor is within 2% of a baseline processor, and with such a system, we could achieve a performance gain of 12% for a suite of benchmarks. Within this suite, the system intensive benchmarks show a performance gain of 20% while the performance of the compute intensive ones remains unaffected. Also, by allocating extra area for cores with sophisticated cache designs, we further improved the performance of the system intensive benchmarks to 30%.