What is SAPHA?

The goal of SAPHA is to design and implement automatic thread-to-core assignment techniques for heterogeneous multi-core processors that will improve the overall utilization of these processors.

Motivation

As multi-core processors are becoming common, vendors are starting to explore trade offs between the die size and the number of cores on a die, leading to heterogeneity among cores on a single chip. For efficient utilization of these processors, application threads must be assigned to cores such that the resource needs of a thread closely matches resource availability at the assigned core. Current methods of thread-to-core assignment often require an application's execution trace to determine it's runtime properties. These traces are obtained by running the application on some representative input. A problem is that developing these representative input sets is time consuming, and requires expertise that the user of a general-purpose processor may not have. In this project, we are designing, implementing and evaluating automatic thread-to-core assignment techniques for heterogeneous multi-core processors that will enhance the utilization of these processors.