Publications by Year: 2016

2016
Y. Liu, et al., “Barrier-Aware Warp Scheduling for Throughput Processors,” in Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Supercomputing, 2016, pp. 42. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Parallel GPGPU applications rely on barrier synchronization to align thread block activity. Few prior work has studied and characterized barrier synchronization within a thread block and its impact on performance. In this paper, we find that barriers cause substantial stall cycles in barrier-intensive GPGPU applications although GPGPUs employ lightweight hardware-support barriers. To help investigate the reasons, we define the execution between two adjacent barriers of a thread block as a warp-phase. We find that the execution progress within a warp-phase varies dramatically across warps, which we call warp-phase-divergence. While warp-phasedivergence may result from execution time disparity among warps due to differences in application code or input, and/or shared resource contention, we also pinpoint that warp-phase-divergence may result from warp scheduling.

To mitigate barrier induced stall cycle inefficiency, we propose barrier-aware warp scheduling (BAWS). It combines two techniques to improve the performance of barrier-intensive GPGPU applications. The first technique, most-waiting-first (MWF), assigns a higher scheduling priority to the warps of a thread block that has a larger number of warps waiting at a barrier. The second technique, critical-fetch-first (CFF), fetches instructions from the warp to be issued by MWF in the next cycle. To evaluate the efficiency of BAWS, we consider 13 barrier-intensive GPGPU applications, and we report that BAWS speeds up performance by 17% and 9% on average (and up to 35% and 30%) over loosely-round-robin (LRR) and greedy-then-oldest (GTO) warp scheduling, respectively. We compare BAWS against recent concurrent work SAWS, finding that BAWS outperforms SAWS by 7% on average and up to 27%. For non-barrier-intensive workloads, we demonstrate that BAWS is performance-neutral compared to GTO and SAWS, while improving performance by 5.7% on average (and up to 22%) compared to LRR. BAWS’ hardware co

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M. Halpern, T. Mummert, M. Novak, E. Duesterwald, and V. J. Reddi, “The Case for Node Multi-Versioning in Cognitive Cloud Services: Achieving Responsiveness and Accuracy at Datacenter Scale,” Workshop on Cognitive Architectures (CogArch). 2016.Abstract

Cognitive cloud services seek to provide end-users with functionalities that have historically required human intellect to complete. End-users expect these services to be both responsive and accurate, which pose conflicting requirements for service providers. Today’s cloud services deployment schemes follow a “one size fits all” scale-out strategy, where multiple instantiations of the same version of the service are used to scale-out and handle all end-users. Meanwhile, many cognitive services are of a statistical nature where deeper exploration yields more accurate results but also requires more processing time. Finding a single service configuration setting that satisfies the latency and accuracy requirements for the largest number of expected end-user requests can be a challenging task. As a result, cognitive cloud service providers are conservatively configured to maximize the number of enduser requests for which a satisfactory latency-accuracy tradeoff can be achieved. Using a production-grade Automatic Speech Recognition cloud service as a representative example to study, we demonstrate the inefficiencies of this single version approach and propose a new service node multi-versioning deployment scheme for cognitive services instead. We present an oracle-based limit study where we show that service node multi-versioning can provide a 2.5X reduction in execution time together with a 24% improvement in accuracy over a traditional single version deployment scheme. We also discuss several design considerations to address when implementing service node multi-versioning.

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M. Kazdagli, L. Huang, V. J. Reddi, and M. Tiwari, “EMMA: A New Platform to Evaluate Hardware-based Mobile Malware Analyses,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.03086, 2016.Abstract

Hardware-based malware detectors (HMDs) are a key emerging technology to build trustworthy computing platforms, especially mobile platforms. Quantifying the efficacy of HMDs against malicious adversaries is thus an important problem. The challenge lies in that real-world malware typically adapts to defenses, evades being run in experimental settings, and hides behind benign applications. Thus, realizing the potential of HMDs as a line of defense – that has a small and battery-efficient code base – requires a rigorous foundation for evaluating HMDs. To this end, we introduce EMMA—a platform to evaluate the efficacy of HMDs for mobile platforms. EMMA deconstructs malware into atomic, orthogonal actions and introduces a systematic way of pitting different HMDs against a diverse subset of malware hidden inside benign applications. EMMA drives both malware and benign programs with real user-inputs to yield an HMD’s effective operating range— i.e., the malware actions a particular HMD is capable of detecting. We show that small atomic actions, such as stealing a Contact or SMS, have surprisingly large hardware footprints, and use this insight to design HMD algorithms that are less intrusive than prior work and yet perform 24.7% better. Finally, EMMA brings up a surprising new result— obfuscation techniques used by malware to evade static analyses makes them more detectable using HMDs.

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Y. Zhu and V. J. Reddi, “GreenWeb: Language Extensions for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Computing,” in Proceedings of the 37th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2016, vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 145-160. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Web computing is gradually shifting toward mobile devices, in which the energy budget is severely constrained. As a result, Web developers must be conscious of energy efficiency. However, current Web languages provide developers little control over energy consumption. In this paper, we take a first step toward language-level research to enable energy-efficient Web computing. Our key motivation is that mobile systems can wisely budget energy usage if informed with user quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. To do this, programmers need new abstractions. We propose two language abstractions, QoS type and QoS target, to capture two fundamental aspects of user QoS experience. We then present GreenWeb, a set of language extensions that empower developers to easily express the QoS abstractions as program annotations. As a proof of concept, we develop a GreenWeb runtime, which intelligently determines how to deliver specified user QoS expectation while minimizing energy consumption. Overall, GreenWeb shows significant energy savings (29.2% ⇠ 66.0%) over Android’s default Interactive governor with few QoS violations. Our work demonstrates a promising first step toward language innovations for energy-efficient Web computing. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.2 [Programming Language]: Language Classifications–Specialized application languages; D.3.3 [Programming Language]: Language Constructs and Features–Constraints Keywords Energy-efficiency, Web, Mobile computing

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M. Halpern, Y. Zhu, and V. J. Reddi, “Mobile Cpu's Rise to Power: Quantifying the Impact of Generational Mobile Cpu Design Trends on Performance, Energy, and User Satisfaction,” in High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2016 IEEE International Symposium on, 2016, pp. 64–76. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In this paper, we assess the past, present, and future of mobile CPU design. We study how mobile CPU designs trends have impacted the end-user, hardware design, and the holistic mobile device. We analyze the evolution of ten cutting-edge mobile CPU designs released over the past seven years. Specifically, we report measured performance, power, energy and user satisfaction trends across mobile CPU generations. A key contribution of our work is that we contextualize the mobile CPU’s evolution in terms of user satisfaction, which has largely been absent from prior mobile hardware studies. To bridge the gap between mobile CPU design and user satisfaction, we construct and conduct a novel crowdsourcing study that spans over 25,000 survey participants using the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. Our methodology allows us to identify what mobile CPU design techniques provide the most benefit to the end-user’s quality of user experience. Our results quantitatively demonstrate that CPUs play a crucial role in modern mobile system-on-chips (SoCs). Over the last seven years, both single- and multicore performance improvements have contributed to end-user satisfaction by reducing user-critical application response latencies. Mobile CPUs aggressively adopted many power-hungry desktoporiented design techniques to reach these performance levels. Unlike other smartphone components (e.g. display and radio) whose peak power consumption has decreased over time, the mobile CPU’s peak power consumption has steadily increased. As the limits of technology scaling restrict the ability of desktop-like scaling to continue for mobile CPUs, specialized accelerators appear to be a promising alternative that can help sustain the power, performance, and energy improvements that mobile computing necessitates. Such a paradigm shift will redefine the role of the CPU within future SoCs, which merit several design considerations based on our findings.

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M. Kazdagli, V. J. Reddi, and M. Tiwari, “Quantifying and Improving the Efficiency of Hardware-Based Mobile Malware Detectors,” in The 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2016, pp. 37. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Hardware-based malware detectors (HMDs) are a key emerging technology to build trustworthy systems, especially mobile platforms. Quantifying the efficacy of HMDs against malicious adversaries is thus an important problem. The challenge lies in that real-world malware adapts to defenses, evades being run in experimental settings, and hides behind benign applications. Thus, realizing the potential of HMDs as a small and battery-efficient line of defense requires a rigorous foundation for evaluating HMDs. We introduce Sherlock—a white-box methodology that quantifies an HMD’s ability to detect malware and identify the reason why. Sherlock first deconstructs malware into atomic, orthogonal actions to synthesize a diverse malware suite. Sherlock then drives both malware and benign programs with real user-inputs, and compares their executions to determine an HMD’s operating range, i.e., the smallest malware actions an HMD can detect. We show three case studies using Sherlock to not only quantify HMDs’ operating ranges but design better detectors. First, using information about concrete malware actions, we build a discretewavelet transform based unsupervised HMD that outperforms prior work based on power transforms by 24.7% (AUC metric). Second, training a supervised HMD using Sherlock’s diverse malware dataset yields 12.5% better HMDs than past approaches that train on ad-hoc subsets of malware. Finally, Sherlock shows why a malware instance is detectable. This yields a surprising new result—obfuscation techniques used by malware to evade static analyses makes them more detectable using HMDs.

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J. Yang, V. J. Reddi, Y. Zhu, and P. Bailis, “Research for Practice: Web Security and Mobile Web Computing,” ACM Queue, vol. 14, no. 4. ACM, pp. 80, 2016. Publisher's Version
N. Chachmon, D. Richins, R. Cohn, M. Christensson, W. Cui, and V. J. Reddi, “Simulation and Analysis Engine for Scale-Out Workloads,” in Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), 2016, pp. 22. Publisher's VersionAbstract

We introduce a system-level Simulation and Analysis Engine (SAE) framework based on dynamic binary instrumentation for fine-grained and customizable instruction-level introspection of everything that executes on the processor. SAE can instrument the BIOS, kernel, drivers, and user processes. It can also instrument multiple systems simultaneously using a single instrumentation interface, which is essential for studying scale-out applications. SAE is an x86 instruction set simulator designed specifically to enable rapid prototyping, evaluation, and validation of architectural extensions and program analysis tools using its flexible APIs. It is fast enough to execute full platform workloads—a modern operating system can boot in a few minutes—thus enabling research, evaluation, and validation of complex functionalities related to multicore configurations, virtualization, security, and more. To reach high speeds, SAE couples tightly with a virtual platform and employs both a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that helps simulate simple instructions eciently and a fast interpreter for simulating new or complex instructions. We describe SAE’s architecture and instrumentation engine design and show the framework’s usefulness for single- and multi-system architectural and program analysis studies.

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Y. Zu, W. Huang, I. Paul, and V. J. Reddi, “Ti-States: Processor Power Management in the Temperature Inversion Region,” in Proceedings of the 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2016, pp. 1–13. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Temperature inversion is a transistor-level effect that can improve performance when temperature increases. It has largely been ignored in the past because it does not occur in the typical operating region of a processor, but temperature inversion is becoming increasing important in current and future technologies. In this paper, we study temperature inversion’s implications on architecture design, and power and performance management. We present the first public comprehensive measurement-based analysis on the effects of temperature inversion on a real processor, using the AMD A10- 8700P processor as our system under test. We show that the extra timing margin introduced by temperature inversion can provide more than 5% Vdd reduction benefit, and this improvement increases to more than 8% when operating in the near-threshold, low-voltage region. To harness this opportunity, we present Tistates, a power management technique that sets the processor’s voltage based on real-time silicon temperature to improve power efficiency. Ti-states lead to 6% to 12% measured power saving across a range of different temperatures compared to a fixed margin. As technology scales to FD-SOI and FinFET, we show there is an ideal operating temperature for various workloads to maximize the benefits of temperature inversion. The key is to counterbalance leakage power increase at higher temperatures with dynamic power reduction by the Ti-states. The projected optimal temperature is typically around 60°C and yields 8% to 9% chip power saving. The optimal high-temperature can be exploited to reduce design cost and runtime operating power for overall cooling. Our findings are important for power and thermal management in future chips and process technologies.

Keywords-timing margin; temperature inversion; power management; reliability; technology scaling

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