research-article

SHERIFF: precise detection and automatic mitigation of false sharing

Authors:

Emery D. BergerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 46, Issue 10

Pages 3 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/2076021.2048070

Published: 22 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

False sharing is an insidious problem for multithreaded programs running on multicore processors, where it can silently degrade performance and scalability. Previous tools for detecting false sharing are severely limited: they cannot distinguish false sharing from true sharing, have high false positive rates, and provide limited assistance to help programmers locate and resolve false sharing.

This paper presents two tools that attack the problem of false sharing: Sheriff-Detect and Sheriff-Protect. Both tools leverage a framework we introduce here called Sheriff. Sheriff breaks out threads into separate processes, and exposes an API that allows programs to perform per-thread memory isolation and tracking on a per-page basis. We believe Sheriff is of independent interest.

Sheriff-Detect finds instances of false sharing by comparing updates within the same cache lines by different threads, and uses sampling to rank them by performance impact. Sheriff-Detect is precise (no false positives), runs with low overhead (on average, 20%), and is accurate, pinpointing the exact objects involved in false sharing. We present a case study demonstrating Sheriff-Detect's effectiveness at locating false sharing in a variety of benchmarks.

Rewriting a program to fix false sharing can be infeasible when source is unavailable, or undesirable when padding objects would unacceptably increase memory consumption or further worsen runtime performance. Sheriff-Protect mitigates false sharing by adaptively isolating shared updates from different threads into separate physical addresses, effectively eliminating most of the performance impact of false sharing. We show that Sheriff-Protect can improve performance for programs with catastrophic false sharing by up to 9×, without programmer intervention.

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Cited By

Patel VBiswas SChaudhuri M(2024)Leveraging Cache Coherence to Detect and Repair False Sharing On-the-fly2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00066(823-839)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00066
Zhao YXiao LBondi AChen BLiu Y(2023)A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Real-Life Performance Issues in Open Source ProjectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.316762849:2(924-946)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3167628
Yi ZYao Y(2021)A stealing mechanism for delegation methodsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-021-03719-277:10(10827-10849)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-021-03719-2
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Index Terms

SHERIFF: precise detection and automatic mitigation of false sharing

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 10

OOPSLA '11

October 2011

1063 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2076021

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
October 2011
1104 pages
ISBN:9781450309400
DOI:10.1145/2048066
General Chair:
Cristina Videira Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathleen Fisher
Tufts University, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2011

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 46, Issue 10

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Cited By

Patel VBiswas SChaudhuri M(2024)Leveraging Cache Coherence to Detect and Repair False Sharing On-the-fly2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00066(823-839)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00066
Zhao YXiao LBondi AChen BLiu Y(2023)A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Real-Life Performance Issues in Open Source ProjectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.316762849:2(924-946)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3167628
Yi ZYao Y(2021)A stealing mechanism for delegation methodsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-021-03719-277:10(10827-10849)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-021-03719-2
Srivatsa AMansour MRheindt SGabriel DWild THerkersdorf A(2021)DynaCo: Dynamic Coherence Management for Tiled Manycore ArchitecturesInternational Journal of Parallel Programming10.1007/s10766-020-00688-649:4(570-599)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10766-020-00688-6
Khan TZhao YPokam GMozafari BKasikci BMcKinley KFisher K(2019)Huron: hybrid false sharing detection and repairProceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3314221.3314644(453-468)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3314221.3314644
Li XGulila A(2019)Optimised memory allocation for less false abortion and better performance in hardware transactional memoryInternational Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems10.1080/17445760.2019.1605605(1-9)Online publication date: 6-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/17445760.2019.1605605
Omar HShi QAhmad MDogan HKhan O(2018)Declarative ResilienceACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/321055917:4(1-27)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3210559
Roghanchi SEriksson JBasu N(2017)ffwdProceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/3132747.3132771(342-358)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3132747.3132771
Rawat TShrivastava ANebel WAtienza D(2015)Enabling multi-threaded applications on hybrid shared memory manycore architecturesProceedings of the 2015 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition10.5555/2755753.2755922(742-747)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2755753.2755922
Tang SXiang MWang YWu BChen JLiu TFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)Scaler: Efficient and Effective Cross Flow AnalysisProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695473(907-918)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695473
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