Power-aware pipelining with automatic concurrency control

Continuous streaming computations are usually composed of different modules, exchanging data through shared message queues. The selection of the algorithm used to access such queues (ie, the concurrency control) is a critical aspect both for performance and power consumption. In this paper, we describe the design of automatic concurrency control algorithm for implementing power-efficient communications on shared-memory multicores. The algorithm automatically switches between nonblocking and blocking concurrency protocols, getting the best from the two worlds, ie, obtaining the same throughput offered by the nonblocking implementation and the same power efficiency of the blocking concurrency protocol. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using two micro-benchmarks and two real streaming applications.