Efficient dynamic pinning of parallelized applications by reinforcement learning with applications

Abstract

This paper describes a dynamic framework for mapping the threads of parallel applications to the computation cores of parallel systems. We propose a feedback-based mechanism where the performance of each thread is collected and used to drive the reinforcement-learning policy of assigning affinities of threads to CPU cores. The proposed framework is flexible enough to address different optimization criteria, such as maximum processing speed and minimum speed variance among threads. We evaluate the framework on the Ant Colony optimization parallel benchmark from the heuristic optimization application domain, and demonstrate that we can achieve an improvement of 12% in the execution time compared to the default operating system scheduling/mapping of threads under varying availability of resources (e.g. when multiple applications are running on the same system).