Measurement and Control of Linux Operating System Noise on the Godson-3A Shared-Memory Multicore Platform

Operating system (OS) noise refers to the interference experienced by an application due to activities inside an operating system. OS noise can significantly hurt the performance of applications, especially parallel applications. We implemented a tool, noise test, to study the characteristics of OS noise on the Godson-3A shared-memory multicore platform running Linux. We found that OS noise was balanced among cores under uniform memory access (UMA) but not under non-uniform memory access (NUMA). We then implemented another tool, quietcpu, to control OS noise. Tests showed the tool could be used to effectively reduce the maximum noise durations by around 50% and the average noise duration by around 5% on our experiment platform.