Sc08 Talk Final

This document summarizes Mitesh R. Meswani's dissertation research on improving throughput of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors using application signatures and thread priorities. The research shows that prioritizing hardware threads based on an application's resource usage characteristics can improve processor throughput over the default equal priorities in nearly half of all tested applications. Signatures representing an application's floating point, fixed point, cache and TLB utilization are captured. Predictions using signature microbenchmarks improve throughput for 87% of application pairs compared to default priorities.