Title:
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Hybrid access-specific software cache techniques for the cell BE architecture
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Author:
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O’Brien, Kathryn; O'Brien, Kevin; González Tallada, Marc; Vujic, Nikola; Martorell Bofill, Xavier; Ayguadé Parra, Eduard; Eichenberger, Alexandre E.; Chen, Tong; Sura, Zehra; Zhang, Tao
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Other authors:
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Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Arquitectura de Computadors; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. CAP - Grup de Computació d'Altes Prestacions |
Abstract:
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Ease of programming is one of the main impediments for the broad acceptance of multi-core systems with no hardware support
for transparent data transfer between local and global memories. Software cache is a robust approach to provide the user with a
transparent view of the memory architecture; but this software approach can suffer from poor performance. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical, hybrid software-cache architecture that classifies at compile time memory accesses in two classes, highlocality
and irregular. Our approach then steers the memory references toward one of two specific cache structures optimized for their respective access pattern. The specific cache structures are optimized to enable high-level compiler optimizations to
aggressively unroll loops, reorder cache references, and/or transform surrounding loops so as to practically eliminate the
software cache overhead in the innermost loop. Performance evaluation indicates that improvements due to the optimized software-cache structures combined with the proposed codeoptimizations translate into 3.5 to 8.4 speedup factors, compared to a traditional software cache approach. As a result, we
demonstrate that the Cell BE processor can be a competitive alternative to a modern server-class multi-core such as the IBM
Power5 processor for a set of parallel NAS applications. |
Abstract:
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Peer Reviewed |
Subject(s):
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-Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Enginyeria del software -Cache memory -Compilers (Computer programs) -OpenMP -Compiler optimizations -Local memories -Memory classification -Software cache -Memòria ràpida de treball (Informàtica) -Compiladors (Programes d'ordinador) |
Rights:
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Document type:
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Article - Published version Conference Object |
Published by:
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Association for Computing Machinery
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