Efficient thread/page/parallelism autotuning for NUMA systems

Current multi-socket systems have complex memory hierarchies with significant Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) effects: memory performance depends on the location of the data and the thread. This complexity means that thread- and data-mappings have a significant impact on performance. However, it is hard to find efficient data mappings and thread configurations due to the complex interactions between applications and systems. In this paper we explore the combined search space of thread mappings, data mappings, number of NUMA nodes, and degree-of-parallelism, per application phase, and across multiple systems. We show that there are significant performance benefits from optimizing this wide range of parameters together. However, such an optimization presents two challenges: accurately modeling the performance impact of configurations across applications and systems, and exploring the vast space of configurations. To overcome the modeling challenge, we use native execution of small, representative codelets, which reproduce the system and application interactions. To make the search practical, we build a search space by combining a range of state of the art thread- and data-mapping policies. Combining these two approaches results in a tractable search space that can be quickly and accurately evaluated without sacrificing significant performance. This search finds non-intuitive configurations that perform significantly better than previous works. With this approach we are able to achieve an average speedup of 1.97× on a four node NUMA system.