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Polling watchdog: combining polling and interrupts for efficient message handling

Authors:

Olivier Maquelin,

Herbert H. J. Hum,

Kevin B. Theobald,

Xin-Min TianAuthors Info & Claims

ISCA '96: Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture

Pages 179 - 188

https://doi.org/10.1145/232973.232992

Published: 01 May 1996 Publication History

Abstract

Parallel systems supporting multithreading, or message passing in general, have typically used either polling or interrupts to handle incoming messages. Neither approach is ideal; either may lead to excessive overheads or message-handling latencies, depending on the application. This paper investigates a combined approach---Polling Watchdog, where both are used depending on the circumstances. The Polling Watchdog is a simple hardware extension that limits the generation of interrupts to the cases where explicit polling fails to handle the message quickly. As an added benefit, this mechanism also has the potential to simplify the interaction between interrupts and the network accesses performed by the program.We present the resulting performance for the EARTH-MANNA-S system, an implementation of the EARTH (Efficient Architecture for Running THreads) execution model on the MANNA multiprocessor. In contrast to the original EARTH-MANNA system, this system does not use a dedicated communication processor. Rather, synchronization and communication tasks are performed on the same processor as the regular computations. Therefore, an efficient message-handling mechanism is essential to good performance. Simulation results and performance measurements show that the Polling Watchdog indeed performs better than either polling or interrupts alone. In fact, this mechanism allows the EARTH-MANNA-S system to achieve the same level of performance as the original EARTH-MANNA multithreaded system.

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Polling watchdog: combining polling and interrupts for efficient message handling

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISCA '96: Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture

May 1996

318 pages

ISBN:0897917863

DOI:10.1145/232973

Chairman:
Jean-Loup Baer
Univ. of Washington, Seattle

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 24, Issue 2
Special Issue: Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture (ISCA '96)
May 1996
303 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/232974
Chairman:
Jean-Loup Baer
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
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Copyright © 1996 Authors.

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SIGARCH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture
IEEE-CS\TCCA: TC on Computer Arhitecture

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 May 1996

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ISCA96: International Conference on Computer Architecture

May 22 - 24, 1996

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 543 of 3,203 submissions, 17%

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