Report Number: CSL-TR-97-730
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Performance Isolation and Resource Sharing on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
Author: Verghese, Ben
Author: Gupta, Anoop
Author: Rosenblum, Mendel
Date: july 1997
Abstract: Shared-memory multiprocessors are attractive as general-purpose compute servers. On the software side, they present programmers with the same programming paradigm as uniprocessors, and they can run unmodified uniprocessor binaries. On the hardware side, the tight coupling of multiple processors, memory, and I/O enables efficient fine-grain sharing of resources on these systems. This fine-grain sharing is important in compute servers because it allows idle resources to be easily utilized by active jobs leading to better system throughput. However, current SMP operating systems do not provide an important feature that users of workstations enjoy, namely the lack of interference from the jobs of unrelated users. We show that this lack of isolation is caused by the resource allocation model carried over from single-user workstations, which is inappropriate for multi-user multiprocessor systems. We propose "performance isolation", a new resource allocation model for multi-user multiprocessor compute servers. This model allows the isolation of the performance of groups of processes from the load on the rest of the system, provides performance comparable to a smaller system that corresponds to the resources used, and allows the sharing of idle resources for throughput comparable to a SMP OS. We implement the performance isolation model in the IRIX5.3 operating system for three important system resources: CPU time, memory, and disk bandwidth. Our implementation of fairness for disk bandwidth is novel. Running a number of workloads we show that this model is very successful at providing workstation-like latencies under heavy load and SMP-like latencies under light load.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/97/730/CSL-TR-97-730.pdf