Computer multitasking

Summary

In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result, a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources such as central processing units (CPUs) and main memory. Multitasking automatically interrupts the running program, saving its state (partial results, memory contents and computer register contents) and loading the saved state of another program and transferring control to it. This "context switch" may be initiated at fixed time intervals (pre-emptive multitasking), or the running program may be coded to signal to the supervisory software when it can be interrupted (cooperative multitasking). Multitasking does not require parallel execution of multiple tasks at exactly the same time; instead, it allows more than one task

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking

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Parallel retrieval of correlated patterns: From Hopfield networks to Boltzmann machines

Andrea De Antoni

In this work, we first revise some extensions of the standard Hopfield model in the low storage limit, namely the correlated attractor case and the multitasking case recently introduced by the authors. The former case is based on a modification of the Hebbian prescription, which induces a coupling between consecutive patterns and this effect is tuned by a parameter a. In the latter case, dilution is introduced in pattern entries, in such a way that a fraction d of them is blank. Then, we merge these two extensions to obtain a system able to retrieve several patterns in parallel and the quality of retrieval, encoded by the set of Mattis magnetizations {m(mu)}, is reminiscent of the correlation among patterns. By tuning the parameters d and a, qualitatively different outputs emerge, ranging from highly hierarchical to symmetric. The investigations are accomplished by means of both numerical simulations and statistical mechanics analysis, properly adapting a novel technique originally developed for spin glasses, i.e. the Hamilton-Jacobi interpolation, with excellent agreement. Finally, we show the thermodynamical equivalence of this associative network with a (restricted) Boltzmann machine and study its stochastic dynamics to obtain even a dynamical picture, perfectly consistent with the static scenario earlier discussed. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Elsevier2013

Database systems access memory either sequentially or randomly. Contrary to sequential access and despite the extensive efforts of computer architects, compiler writers, and system builders, random access to data larger than the processor cache has been synonymous to inefficient execution. Especially in the big data era, data processing is memory bound, and accesses to DRAM and non-volatile memory each take several tens or hundreds of nanoseconds respectively, posing a great challenge to current processors. Due to the mismatch between the way humans write code and the way processors execute this code, workload execution stalls on main memory access, instead of executing the other parallel work that typically exists in big data workloads. This thesis establishes cooperative multitasking as the principal way to hide memory latency in operations that consist of parallel tasks. We first systematize cooperative multitasking presenting an analogue of Amdahl's law for latency hiding. More importantly, we then introduce interleaving with coroutines, a general-purpose and practical technique to interleave the execution of parallel tasks within one thread interleaved execution and thereby hide memory access. This form of cooperative multitasking enables significant performance improvements for analytical and transactional use cases that suffer from unavoidable memory accesses, such as index joins and tuple reconstruction, as well as concurrent GET and PUT operations in key-value stores. Given enough parallel work, sufficient hardware support for concurrent memory accesses, and a low-overhead mechanism to switch between tasks, interleaved execution renders important database operations oblivious to memory latency and makes their execution behave as if all accessed data resides in the processor cache.

EPFL2019

Interleaving with coroutines: a systematic and practical approach to hide memory latency in index joins

Anastasia Ailamaki, Georgios Psaropoulos

Index joins present a case of pointer-chasing code that causes data cache misses. In principle, we can hide these cache misses by overlapping them with computation: The lookups involved in an index join are parallel tasks whose execution can be interleaved, so that, when a cache miss occurs in one task, the processor executes independent instructions from another one. Yet, the literature provides no concrete performance model for such interleaved execution and, more importantly, production systems still waste processor cycles on cache misses because (a) hardware and compiler limitations prohibit automatic task interleaving and (b) existing techniques that involve the programmer produce unmaintainable code and are thus avoided in practice. In this paper, we address these shortcomings: we model interleaved execution explaining how to estimate the speedup of any interleaving technique, and we propose interleaving with coroutines, i.e., functions that suspend their execution for later resumption. We deploy coroutines on index joins running in SAP HANA and show that interleaving with coroutines performs like other state-of-the-art techniques, retains close resemblance to the original code, and supports both interleaved and non-interleaved execution in the same implementation. Thus, we establish the first systematic and practical approach for interleaving index joins of any type.

2018