Title:
|
A flexible heterogeneous multi-core architecture
|
Author:
|
Pericàs Gleim, Miquel; Cristal Kestelman, Adrián; Cazorla, Francisco; González García, Rubén; Jiménez, Daniel A.; Valero Cortés, Mateo
|
Other authors:
|
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Arquitectura de Computadors; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. CAP - Grup de Computació d'Altes Prestacions |
Abstract:
|
Multi-core processors naturally exploit thread-level parallelism (TLP). However, extracting instruction-level parallelism (ILP) from individual applications or threads is still a challenge as application mixes in this environment are nonuniform. Thus, multi-core processors should be flexible enough to provide high throughput for uniform parallel applications as well as high performance for more general workloads. Heterogeneous architectures are a first step in this direction, but partitioning remains static and only roughly fits application requirements. This paper proposes the Flexible Heterogeneous Mul-tiCore processor (FMC), the first dynamic heterogeneous multi-core architecture capable of reconfiguring itself to fit application requirements without programmer intervention. The basic building block of this microarchitecture is a scalable, variable-size window microarchitecture that exploits the concept of Execution Locality to provide large-window capabilities. This allows to overcome the memory wall for applications with high memory-level parallelism (MLP). The microarchitecture contains a set of small and fast cache processors that execute high locality code and a network of small in-order memory engines that together exploit low locality code. Single-threaded applications can use the entire network of cores while multi-threaded applications can efficiently share the resources. The sizing of critical structures remains small enough to handle current power envelopes. In single-threaded mode this processor is able to outperform previous state-of-the-art high-performance processor research by 12% on SpecFP. We show how in a quad- threaded/quad-core environment the processor outperforms a statically allocated configuration in both throughput and harmonic mean, two commonly used metrics to evaluate SMTperformance, by around 2-4%. This is achieved while using a very simple sharing algorithm. |
Abstract:
|
Peer Reviewed |
Subject(s):
|
-Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Arquitectura de computadors -Simultaneous multithreading processors -Parallel processing (Electronic computers) -Reconfigurable architectures -Multiprocessing systems -Multi-threading -Parallel architectures -Processament en paral·lel (Ordinadors) -Multiprocessors |
Rights:
|
|
Document type:
|
Article - Published version Conference Object |
Published by:
|
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
|
Share:
|
|