Pinned OS/Services: A Case Study of XML Parsing on Intel SCC

Nowadays,we are heading towards integrating hundreds to thousands of cores on a single chip.However,traditional system software and middleware are not well suited to manage and provide services at such large scale.To improve the scalability and adaptability of operating system and middleware services on future many-core platform,we propose the pinned OS/services.By porting each OS and runtime system(middleware) service to a separate core(special hardware acceleration),we expect to achieve maximal performance gain and energy efficiency in many-core environments.As a case study,we target on XML(Extensible Markup Language),the commonly used data transfer/store standard in the world.We have successfully implemented and evaluated the design of porting XML parsing service onto Intel 48-core Single-Chip Cloud Computer(SCC) platform.The results show that it can provide considerable energy saving.However,we also identified heavy performance penalties introduced from memory side,making the parsing service bloated.Hence,as a further step,we propose the memory-side hardware accelerator for XML parsing.With specified hardware design,we can further enhance the performance gain and energy efficiency,where the performance can be improved by 20% with 12.27% energy reduction.     

Influence of sulfenamide accelerators on cure kinetics and properties of natural rubber foam

The effect of types of sulfenamide accelerator, i.e., 2‐morpholinothiobenzotiazole (MBS), N‐t‐butylbenzothiazole‐2‐sulfenamide (TBBS), and N‐cyclohexyl benzothiazole‐2‐sulfenamide (CBS) on the cure kinetics and properties of natural rubber foam was studied. It has been found that the natural rubber compound with CBS accelerator shows the fastest sulfur vulcanization rate and the lowest activation energy (E_a) because CBS accelerator produces higher level of basicity of amine species than other sulfenamide accelerators, further forming a complex structure with zinc ion as ligand in sulfur vulcanization. Because of the fastest cure rate of CBS accelerator, natural rubber foam with CBS accelerator shows the smallest bubble size and narrowest bubble size distribution. Moreover, it exhibits the lowest cell density, thermal conductivity and thermal expansion coefficient, as well as the highest compression set as a result of fast crosslink reaction. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2017 , 134, 44822.     

How many cores do we need to run a parallel workload: A test drive of the Intel SCC platform?

As semiconductor manufacturing technology continues to improve, it is possible to integrate more and more transistors onto a single processor. Many-core processor design has resulted in part from the search to utilize this enormous transistor real estate. The Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is an experimental many-core processor created by Intel Labs. In this paper we present a study in which we analyze this innovative many-core system by running several workloads with distinctive parallelism characteristics. We investigate the effect on system performance by monitoring specific hardware performance counters. Then, we experiment on varying different hardware configuration parameters such as number of cores, clock frequency and voltage levels. We execute the chosen workloads and collect the timing, power consumption and energy consumption information on such a many-core research platform. Thus, we can comprehensively analyze the behavior and scalability of the Intel SCC system with the introduced workload in terms of performance and energy consumption. Our results show that the profiled parallel workload execution has a communication bottleneck on the Intel SCC system. Moreover, our results indicate that we should carefully choose the number of cores to execute different workloads in order to yield a balance between execution performance and energy efficiency for different applications.