Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new approach to software development that will allow common computer programs to run up to 20 percent faster and possibly incorporate new security measures.
The researchers have found a way to run different parts of some hard-to-parallelize programs — such as word processors and web browsers — at the same time, which makes the programs operate more efficiently.
Every computer program consists of multiple steps. The program will perform a computation, then perform a memory-management function — which prepares memory storage to contain data or frees up memory storage which is currently in use. It repeats these steps over and over again, in a cycle. And, for difficult-to-parallelize programs, both of these steps have traditionally been performed in a single core.
"We've removed the memory-management step from the process, running it as a separate thread," said Yan Solihin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, director of this research project, and co-author of a paper describing the research. Under this approach, the computation thread and memory-management thread are executing simultaneously, allowing the computer program to operate more efficiently.
"By running the memory-management functions on a separate thread, these hard-to-parallelize programs can operate approximately 20 percent faster," Solihin says. "This also opens the door to development of new memory-management functions that could identify anomalies in program behavior, or perform additional security checks. Previously, these functions would have been unduly time consuming, slowing down the speed of the overall program."
Using the new technique, when a memory-management function needs to be performed, "the computational thread notifies the memory-management thread — effectively telling it to allocate data storage and to notify the computational thread of where the storage space is located," said Devesh Tiwari, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of the paper. "By the same token, when the computational thread no longer needs certain data, it informs the memory-management thread that the relevant storage space can be freed."
The paper, "MMT: Exploiting Fine-Grained Parallelism in Dynamic Memory Management," was presented this week at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in Atlanta. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper is co-authored by Tiwari, Solihin, NC State Ph.D. student Sanghoon Lee, and James Tuck, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State.
