Slowing down for performance and energy: an OS-centric study in network driven workloads
Files
First author draft
Date
2021-12-13
DOI
Authors
Dong, Han
Arora, Sanjay
Awad, Yara
Unger, Tommy
Krieger, Orran
Appavoo, Jonathan
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
H. Dong, S. Arora, Y. Awad, T. Unger, O. Krieger, J. Appavoo. 2021. "Slowing Down for Performance and Energy: An OS-Centric Study in Network Driven Workloads." https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07010
Abstract
This paper studies three fundamental aspects of an OS that
impact the performance and energy efficiency of network
processing: 1) batching, 2) processor energy settings, and
3) the logic and instructions of the OS networking paths. A
network device’s interrupt delay feature is used to induce
batching and processor frequency is manipulated to control
the speed of instruction execution. A baremetal library OS
is used to explore OS path specialization. This study shows
how careful use of batching and interrupt delay results in
2X energy and performance improvements across different
workloads. Surprisingly, we find polling can be made energy
efficient and can result in gains up to 11X over baseline Linux.
We developed a methodology and a set of tools to collect
system data in order to understand how energy is impacted
at a fine-grained granularity. This paper identifies a number
of other novel findings that have implications in OS design
for networked applications and suggests a path forward to
consider energy as a focal point of systems research.
Description
License
Copyright: The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted OpenBU a non-exclusive license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.