Award Date

12-1-2012

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Committee Member

Henry Selvaraj

Second Committee Member

Emma Regentova

Third Committee Member

Yingtao Jiang

Fourth Committee Member

Laxmi P. Gewali

Number of Pages

84

Abstract

The advancements in the semiconductor process technology and the current demand for highly parallel computing has led to the advent of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). CMP is the integration of two or more independent processor cores, which can read and execute program instructions, on to a single integrated circuit die. CMPs are the main computing platforms for research and development in parallel and high performance computing environments. They offer minimum inter-core communication latencies as the processor cores are present on a single chip.

The Operating System (OS) plays a key role in using a CMP effectively. The OS should support a multi-user environment in which the jobs are executed in parallel on different cores. This is handled by the processor management system of the OS. The Processor Management System consists of Job Scheduler (JS) and Processor Allocator (PA). The JS aligns the jobs in a queue in an order which is determined by the scheduling policy employed and thus specifying the job that is to be executed next. The PA deals with the selection of appropriate set of processors to execute the job scheduled by the job scheduler. Efficient design of a PA is crucial if one is to harness the full computational power of a CMP in large parallel computing systems.

This thesis deals with the processor allocation part of the processor management system. The motive of this thesis is the hardware implementation of a PA for a mesh-connected CMP. The PA is implemented and a synthesis report is presented which shows the amount of logic utilized. Many contiguous and non-contiguous allocation strategies have been proposed for mesh networks in the recent years. The Improvised First Fit algorithm is used to select the appropriate set of processors for executing an incoming job in this hardware implementation. This algorithm is a contiguous allocation algorithm and has complete sub-mesh recognition ability and uses a bit-map approach. The JS is assumed to be employing a First Come First Serve (FCFS) policy to schedule the jobs. This thesis also acts as the basis for the hardware implementation of PA that uses other allocation algorithms in different topologies.

Keywords

Chip multiprocessors; Hardware implementation; Multiprocessors; Parallel processing (Electronic computers); Processor allocation

Disciplines

Computer Engineering | Electrical and Computer Engineering | Hardware Systems

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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