CROSS-LAYER CUSTOMIZATION FOR LOW POWER AND HIGH PERFORMANCE EMBEDDED MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS

Due to physical limitations and design difficulties, computer processor architecture has shifted to multi-core and even many-core based approaches in recent years. Such architectures provide potentials for sustainable performance scaling into future peta-scale/exa-scale computing platforms, at affordable power budget, design complexity, and verification efforts. To date, multi-core processor products have been replacing uni-core processors in almost every market segment, including embedded systems, general-purpose desktops and laptops, and super computers. However, many issues still remain with multi-core processor architectures that need to be addressed before their potentials could be fully realized. People in both academia and industry research community are still seeking proper ways to make efficient and effective use of these processors. The issues involve hardware architecture trade-offs, the system software service, the run-time management, and user application design, which demand more research effort into this field. Due to the architectural specialties with multi-core based computers, a Cross-Layer Customization framework is proposed in this work, which combines application specific information and system platform features, along with necessary operating system service support, to achieve exceptional power and performance efficiency for targeted multi-core platforms. Several topics are covered with specific optimization goals, including snoop cache coherence protocol, inter-core communication for producer-consumer applications, synchronization mechanisms, and off-chip memory bandwidth limitations. Analysis of benchmark program execution with conventional mechanisms is made to reveal the overheads in terms of power and performance. Specific customizations are proposed to eliminate such overheads with support from hardware, system software, compiler, and user applications. Experiments show significant improvement on system performance and power efficiency

Area-efficient snoopy-aware NoC design for high-performance chip multiprocessor systems

Manycore CMP systems are expected to grow to tens or even hundreds of cores. In this paper we show that the effective co-design of both, the network-on-chip and the coherence protocol, improves performance and power meanwhile total area resources remain bounded. We propose a snoopy-aware network-on-chip topology made of two mesh-of-tree topologies. Reducing the complexity of the coherence protocol - and hence its resources - and moving this complexity to the network, leads to a global decrease in power consumption meanwhile area is barely affected. Benefits of our proposal are due to the high-throughput and low delay of the network, but also due to the simplicity of the coherence protocol. The proposed network and protocol minimizes communication amongst cores when compared to traditional solutions based either on 2D-mesh topologies or in directory-based protocols. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Roca Pérez, A.; Hernández Luz, C.; Lodde, M.; Flich Cardo, J. (2015). Area-efficient snoopy-aware NoC design for high-performance chip multiprocessor systems. Computers and Electrical Engineering. 45:374-385. doi:10.1016/j.compeleceng.2015.04.020S3743854

Design and Implementation of a Chip Multiprocessor with an Efficient Multilevel Cache System

Computer designers utilize the recent huge advances in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) to get Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) by placing several processors on the same chip die. The CMP is the dominant architecture to improve the performance of the current computing systems. However, accessing a shared data by several processors is a primary challenge in CMP. The data consistency must be reached among all memory hierarchies to ensure correct behavior and higher performance. This paper, proposed a CMP with an efficient multilevel cache system, which enhances miss rate and latency (penalty) by designing and implementation of different write policies with two levels of cache. The proposed system is implemented and tested using Hardware Description Language (VHDL) on Altera’s FPGA chip. The results show that a combination of write-through without buffer for the first level and write-back for the second level offers a clear improvement on the multilevel cache system performance

Proximity coherence for chip-multiprocessors

Many-core architectures provide an efficient way of harnessing the growing numbers of transistors available in modern fabrication processes; however, the parallel programs run on these platforms are increasingly limited by the energy and latency costs of communication. Existing designs provide a functional communication layer but do not necessarily implement the most efficient solution for chip-multiprocessors, placing limits on the performance of these complex systems. In an era of increasingly power limited silicon design, efficiency is now a primary concern that motivates designers to look again at the challenge of cache coherence. The first step in the design process is to analyse the communication behaviour of parallel benchmark suites such as Parsec and SPLASH-2. This thesis presents work detailing the sharing patterns observed when running the full benchmarks on a simulated 32-core x86 machine. The results reveal considerable locality of shared data accesses between threads with consecutive operating system assigned thread IDs. This pattern, although of little consequence in a multi-node system, corresponds to strong physical locality of shared data between adjacent cores on a chip-multiprocessor platform. Traditional cache coherence protocols, although often used in chip-multiprocessor designs, have been developed in the context of older multi-node systems. By redesigning coherence protocols to exploit new patterns such as the physical locality of shared data, improving the efficiency of communication, specifically in chip-multiprocessors, is possible. This thesis explores such a design – Proximity Coherence – a novel scheme in which L1 load misses are optimistically forwarded to nearby caches via new dedicated links rather than always being indirected via a directory structure.EPSRC DTA research scholarshi

An Efficient Cache Organization for On-Chip Multiprocessor Networks

To meet the growing computation-intensive applications and the needs of low-power, high-performance systems, the number of computing resources in single-chip has enormously increased. By adding many computing resources to build a system in System-on-Chip, its interconnection between each other becomes another challenging issue. In most System-on-Chip applications, a shared bus interconnection which needs an arbitration logic to serialize several bus access requests, is adopted to communicate with each integrated processing unit because of its low-cost and simple control characteristics. This paper focuses on the interconnection design issues of area, power and performance of chip multi-processors with shared cache memory. It shows that having shared cache memory contributes to the performance improvement, however, typical interconnection between cores and the shared cache using crossbar occupies most of the chip area, consumes a lot of power and does not scale efficiently with increased number of cores. New interconnection mechanisms are needed to address these issues. This paper proposes an architectural paradigm in an attempt to gain the advantages of having shared cache with the avoidance of penalty imposed by the crossbar interconnect. The proposed architecture achieves smaller area occupation allowing more space to add additional cache memory. It also reduces power consumption compared to the existing crossbar architecture. Furthermore, the paper presents a modified cache coherence algorithm called Tuned-MESI. It is based on the typical MESI cache coherence algorithm however it is tuned and tailored for the suggested architecture. The achieved results of the conducted simulated experiments show that the developed architecture produces less broadcast operations compared to the typical algorithm

SIMD based multicore processor for image and video processing

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3602号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2012/3/15 ; 早大学位記番号:新595

Wire management for coherence traffic in chip multiprocessors

Journal ArticleImprovements in semiconductor technology have made it possible to include multiple processor cores on a single die. Chip Multi-Processors (CMP) are an attractive choice for future billion transistor architectures due to their low design complexity, high clock frequency, and high throughput. In a typical CMP architecture, the L2 cache is shared by multiple cores and data coherence is maintained among private L1s. Coherence operations entail frequent communication over global on-chip wires. In future technologies, communication between different L1s will have a significant impact on overall processor performance and power consumption. On-chip wires can be designed to have different latency, bandwidth, and energy properties. Likewise, coherence protocol messages have different latency and bandwidth needs. We propose an interconnect comprised of wires with varying latency, bandwidth, and energy characteristics, and advocate intelligently mapping coherence operations to the appropriate wires. In this paper, we present a comprehensive list of techniques that allow coherence protocols to exploit a heterogeneous interconnect and present preliminary data that indicates the potential of these techniques to significantly improve performance and reduce power consumption. We further demonstrate that most of these techniques can be implemented at a minimum complexity overhead

Energy-Efficient Cache Coherence for Embedded Multi-Processor Systems through Application-Driven Snoop Filtering

We present a novel methodology for power reduction in embedded multiprocessor systems. Maintaining local caches coherent in bus-based multiprocessor systems results in significantly elevated power consumption, as the bus snooping protocols result in local cache lookups for each memory reference placed on the common bus. Such a conservative approach is warranted in general-purpose systems, where no prior knowledge regarding the communication structure between threads or processes is available. In such a general-purpose context the assumption is that each memory request is potentially a reference to a shared memory region, which may result in cache inconsistency, if no correcting activities are undertaken. The approach we propose exploits the fact that in embedded systems, important knowledge is available to the system designers regarding communication activities between tasks allocated to the different processor nodes. We demonstrate how the snoop-related cache probing activity can be drastically reduced by identifying in a deterministic way all the shared memory regions and the communication patterns between the processor nodes. Cache snoop activity is enabled only for the fraction of the bus transactions, which refer to locations belonging to known shared memory region for each processor node; for the remaining larger part of memory references known to be of no relation to the given processor node, snoop probings in the local cache are completely disabled, thus saving a large amount of power. The required hardware support is not only cost-efficient, but is also software programmable, which allows the system software to dynamically customize the cache coherence controller to the needs of different tasks or even different parts of the same program. The experiments which we have performed on a number of important applications demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Towards scalable, energy-efficient, bus-based on-chip networks

Journal ArticleIt is expected that future on-chip networks for many-core processors will impose huge overheads in terms of energy, delay, complexity, verification effort, and area. There is a common belief that the bandwidth necessary for future applications can only be provided by employing packet-switched networks with complex routers and a scalable directory-based coherence protocol. We posit that such a scheme might likely be overkill in a well designed system in addition to being expensive in terms of power because of a large number of power-hungry routers. We show that bus-based networks with snooping protocols can significantly lower energy consumption and simplify network/ protocol design and verification, with no loss in performance. We achieve these characteristics by dividing the chip into multiple segments, each having its own broadcast bus, with these buses further connected by a central bus. This helps eliminate expensive routers, but suffers from the energy overhead of long wires. We propose the use of multiple Bloom filters to effectively track data presence in the cache and restrict bus broadcasts to a subset of segments, significantly reducing energy consumption. We further show that the use of OS page coloring helps maximize locality and improves the effectiveness of the Bloom filters. We also employ low-swing wiring to further reduce the energy overheads of the links. Performance can also be improved at relatively low costs by utilizing more of the abundant metal budgets on-chip and employing multiple address-interleaved buses rather than multiple routers. Thus, with the combination of all the above innovations, we extend the scalability of buses and believe that buses can be a viable and attractive option for future on-chip networks. We show energy reductions of up to 31X on average compared to many state-of-the-art packet switched networks

Scalability of broadcast performance in wireless network-on-chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are currently the paradigm of choice to interconnect the cores of a chip multiprocessor. However, conventional NoCs may not suffice to fulfill the on-chip communication requirements of processors with hundreds or thousands of cores. The main reason is that the performance of such networks drops as the number of cores grows, especially in the presence of multicast and broadcast traffic. This not only limits the scalability of current multiprocessor architectures, but also sets a performance wall that prevents the development of architectures that generate moderate-to-high levels of multicast. In this paper, a Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) where all cores share a single broadband channel is presented. Such design is conceived to provide low latency and ordered delivery for multicast/broadcast traffic, in an attempt to complement a wireline NoC that will transport the rest of communication flows. To assess the feasibility of this approach, the network performance of WNoC is analyzed as a function of the system size and the channel capacity, and then compared to that of wireline NoCs with embedded multicast support. Based on this evaluation, preliminary results on the potential performance of the proposed hybrid scheme are provided, together with guidelines for the design of MAC protocols for WNoC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version