531 research outputs found

    Three-dimensional memory vectorization for high bandwidth media memory systems

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    Vector processors have good performance, cost and adaptability when targeting multimedia applications. However, for a significant number of media programs, conventional memory configurations fail to deliver enough memory references per cycle to feed the SIMD functional units. This paper addresses the problem of the memory bandwidth. We propose a novel mechanism suitable for 2-dimensional vector architectures and targeted at providing high effective bandwidth for SIMD memory instructions. The basis of this mechanism is the extension of the scope of vectorization at the memory level, so that 3-dimensional memory patterns can be fetched into a second-level register file. By fetching long blocks of data and by reusing 2-dimensional memory streams at this second-level register file, we obtain a significant increase in the effective memory bandwidth. As side benefits, the new 3-dimensional load instructions provide a high robustness to memory latency and a significant reduction of the cache activity, thus reducing power and energy requirements. At the investment of a 50% more area than a regular SIMD register file, we have measured and average speed-up of 13% and the potential for power savings in the L2 cache of a 30%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

    Compiling vector pascal to the XeonPhi

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    Intel's XeonPhi is a highly parallel x86 architecture chip made by Intel. It has a number of novel features which make it a particularly challenging target for the compiler writer. This paper describes the techniques used to port the Glasgow Vector Pascal Compiler to this architecture and assess its performance by comparisons of the XeonPhi with 3 other machines running the same algorithms

    Developing a compiler for the XeonPhi (TR-2014-341)

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    The XeonPhi is a highly parallel x86 architecture chip made by Intel. It has a number of novel features which make it a particularly challenging target for the compiler writer. This paper describes the techniques used to port the Glasgow Vector Pascal Compiler (VPC) to this architecture and assess its performance by comparisons of the XeonPhi with 3 other machines running the same algorithms

    Impulse: building a smarter memory controller

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    Journal ArticleImpulse is a new memory system architecture that adds two important features to a traditional memory controller. First, Impulse supports application-specific optimizations through configurable physical address remapping. By remapping physical addresses, applications control how their data is accessed and cached, improving their cache and bus utilization. Second, Impulse supports prefetching at the memory controller, which can hide much of the latency of DRAM accesses. In this paper we describe the design of the Impulse architecture, and show how an Impulse memory system can be used to improve the performance of memory-bound programs. For the NAS conjugate gradient benchmark, Impulse improves performance by 67%. Because it requires no modification to processor, cache, or bus designs, Impulse can be adopted in conventional systems. In addition to scientific applications, we expect that Impulse will benefit regularly strided, memory-bound applications of commercial importance, such as database and multimedia programs

    Impulse: Memory System Support for Scientific Applications

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    CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks

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    In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a trusted execution environment within the processor. SGX relies on the hardware, and claims runtime protection even if the OS and other software components are malicious. However, SGX disregards side-channel attacks. We introduce a powerful cache side-channel attack that provides system adversaries a high resolution channel. Our attack tool named CacheZoom is able to virtually track all memory accesses of SGX enclaves with high spatial and temporal precision. As proof of concept, we demonstrate AES key recovery attacks on commonly used implementations including those that were believed to be resistant in previous scenarios. Our results show that SGX cannot protect critical data sensitive computations, and efficient AES key recovery is possible in a practical environment. In contrast to previous works which require hundreds of measurements, this is the first cache side-channel attack on a real system that can recover AES keys with a minimal number of measurements. We can successfully recover AES keys from T-Table based implementations with as few as ten measurements.Comment: Accepted at Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES '17

    An Efficient Vectorized Hash Table for Batch Computations

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    In recent years, the increasing demand for high-performance analytics on big data has led the research on batch hash tables. It is shown that this type of hash table can benefit from the cache locality and multi-threading more than ordinary hash tables. Moreover, the batch design for hash tables is amenable to using advanced features of modern processors such as prefetching and SIMD vectorization. While state-of-the-art research and open-source projects on batch hash tables made efforts to propose improved designs by better usage of mentioned hardware features, their approaches still do not fully exploit the existing opportunities for performance improvements. Furthermore, there is a gap for a high-level batch API of such hash tables for wider adoption of these high-performance data structures. In this paper, we present Vec-HT, a parallel, SIMD-vectorized, and prefetching-enabled hash table for fast batch processing. To allow developers to fully take advantage of its performance, we recommend a high-level batch API design. Our experimental results show the superiority and competitiveness of this approach in comparison with the alternative implementations and state-of-the-art for the data-intensive workloads of relational join processing, set operations, and sparse vector processing
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