Evaluating Scalability of Emerging Multithreaded Applications on Commodity Multicore Server

The performance of multithreaded applications is often limited by resources such as shared cache and memory bandwidth. Several prior studies have examined this issue, but most of them have been constrained by the use of simulators and out-of-date benchmarks. In this work, we conduct an experiment on real commodity CMP machines, using a recently released CMP benchmark suite, PARSEC, to investigate the influence of cache sharing and memory bandwidth on the scalability of emerging parallel applications. The results reveal that the behavioral characteristics of these benchmarks. We find that the shared cache and memory bandwidth are indeed the bottlenecks for some of these applications. The conclusion provides implications for hardware manufacturers and system software designers to build scalable parallel system.