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

Programming MPSoC platforms: Road works ahead

This paper summarizes a special session on multicore/multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) programming challenges. The current trend towards MPSoC platforms in most computing domains does not only mean a radical change in computer architecture. Even more important from a SW developer´s viewpoint, at the same time the classical sequential von Neumann programming model needs to be overcome. Efficient utilization of the MPSoC HW resources demands for radically new models and corresponding SW development tools, capable of exploiting the available parallelism and guaranteeing bug-free parallel SW. While several standards are established in the high-performance computing domain (e.g. OpenMP), it is clear that more innovations are required for successful\ud deployment of heterogeneous embedded MPSoC. On the other hand, at least for coming years, the freedom for disruptive programming technologies is limited by the huge amount of certified sequential code that demands for a more pragmatic, gradual tool and code replacement strategy

A scalable architecture for ordered parallelism

We present Swarm, a novel architecture that exploits ordered irregular parallelism, which is abundant but hard to mine with current software and hardware techniques. In this architecture, programs consist of short tasks with programmer-specified timestamps. Swarm executes tasks speculatively and out of order, and efficiently speculates thousands of tasks ahead of the earliest active task to uncover ordered parallelism. Swarm builds on prior TLS and HTM schemes, and contributes several new techniques that allow it to scale to large core counts and speculation windows, including a new execution model, speculation-aware hardware task management, selective aborts, and scalable ordered commits. We evaluate Swarm on graph analytics, simulation, and database benchmarks. At 64 cores, Swarm achieves 51--122× speedups over a single-core system, and out-performs software-only parallel algorithms by 3--18×.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CAREER-145299

Pro++: A Profiling Framework for Primitive-based GPU Programming

Parallelizing software applications through the use of existing optimized primitives is a common trend that mediates the complexity of manual parallelization and the use of less efficient directive-based programming models. Parallel primitive libraries allow software engineers to map any sequential code to a target many-core architecture by identifying the most computational intensive code sections and mapping them into one ore more existing primitives. On the other hand, the spreading of such a primitive-based programming model and the different GPU architectures have led to a large and increasing number of third-party libraries, which often provide different implementations of the same primitive, each one optimized for a specific architecture. From the developer point of view, this moves the actual problem of parallelizing the software application to selecting, among the several implementations, the most efficient primitives for the target platform. This paper presents Pro++, a profiling framework for GPU primitives that allows measuring the implementation quality of a given primitive by considering the target architecture characteristics. The framework collects the information provided by a standard GPU profiler and combines them into optimization criteria. The criteria evaluations are weighed to distinguish the impact of each optimization on the overall quality of the primitive implementation. The paper shows how the tuning of the different weights has been conducted through the analysis of five of the most widespread existing primitive libraries and how the framework has been eventually applied to improve the implementation performance of two standard and widespread primitives

Reducing consistency traffic and cache misses in the avalanche multiprocessor

Journal ArticleFor a parallel architecture to scale effectively, communication latency between processors must be avoided. We have found that the source of a large number of avoidable cache misses is the use of hardwired write-invalidate coherency protocols, which often exhibit high cache miss rates due to excessive invalidations and subsequent reloading of shared data. In the Avalanche project at the University of Utah, we are building a 64-node multiprocessor designed to reduce the end-to-end communication latency of both shared memory and message passing programs. As part of our design efforts, we are evaluating the potential performance benefits and implementation complexity of providing hardware support for multiple coherency protocols. Using a detailed architecture simulation of Avalanche, we have found that support for multiple consistency protocols can reduce the time parallel applications spend stalled on memory operations by up to 66% and overall execution time by up to 31%. Most of this reduction in memory stall time is due to a novel release-consistent multiple-writer write-update protocol implemented using a write state buffer

DynAMO: Improving parallelism through dynamic placement of atomic memory operations

With increasing core counts in modern multi-core designs, the overhead of synchronization jeopardizes the scalability and efficiency of parallel applications. To mitigate these overheads, modern cache-coherent protocols offer support for Atomic Memory Operations (AMOs) that can be executed near-core (near) or remotely in the on-chip memory hierarchy (far). This paper evaluates current available static AMO execution policies implemented in multi-core Systems-on-Chip (SoC) designs, which select AMOs' execution placement (near or far) based on the cache block coherence state. We propose three static policies and show that the performance of static policies is application dependent. Moreover, we show that one of our proposed static policies outperforms currently available implementations. Furthermore, we propose DynAMO, a predictor that selects the best location to execute the AMOs. DynAMO identifies the different locality patterns to make informed decisions, improving AMO latency and increasing overall throughput. DynAMO outperforms the best-performing static policy and provides geometric mean speed-ups of 1.09× across all workloads and 1.31× on AMO-intensive applications with respect to executing all AMOs near.This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN) through contracts [PID2019-107255GB-C21], [TED2021-132634A-I00], and [PID2019-105660RB-C21]; the Generalitat of Catalunya through contract [2021-SGR-00763]; the Government of Aragon [T5820R]; the Arm-BSC Center of Excellence, and the European Processor Initiative (EPI) which is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 826647. V. Soria-Pardos has been supported through an FPU fellowship [FPU20-02132]; A. Armejach is a Serra Hunter Fellow and has been partially supported by the Grant [IJCI-2017-33945] funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; M. Moreto through a Ramón y Cajal fellowship [RYC-2016-21104].Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluation of OpenMP for the Cyclops multithreaded architecture

Multithreaded architectures have the potential of tolerating large memory and functional unit latencies and increase resource utilization. The Blue Gene/Cyclops architecture, being developed at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, is one such systems that offers massive intra-chip parallelism. Although the BG/C architecture was initially designed to execute specific applications, we believe that it can be effectively used on a broad range of parallel numerical applications. Programming such applications for this unconventional design requires a significant porting effort when using the basic built-in mechanisms for thread management and synchronization. In this paper, we describe the implementation of an OpenMP environment for parallelizing applications, currently under development at the CEPBA-IBM Research Institute, targeting BG/C. The environment is evaluated with a set of simple numerical kernels and a subset of the NAS OpenMP benchmarks. We identify issues that were not initially considered in the design of the BG/C architecture to support a programming model such as OpenMP. We also evaluate features currently offered by the BG/C architecture that should be considered in the implementation of an efficient OpenMP layer for massive intra-chip parallel architectures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Parallel architectures and runtime systems co-design for task-based programming models

The increasing parallelism levels in modern computing systems has extolled the need for a holistic vision when designing multiprocessor architectures taking in account the needs of the programming models and applications. Nowadays, system design consists of several layers on top of each other from the architecture up to the application software. Although this design allows to do a separation of concerns where it is possible to independently change layers due to a well-known interface between them, it is hampering future systems design as the Law of Moore reaches to an end. Current performance improvements on computer architecture are driven by the shrinkage of the transistor channel width, allowing faster and more power efficient chips to be made. However, technology is reaching physical limitations were the transistor size will not be able to be reduced furthermore and requires a change of paradigm in systems design. This thesis proposes to break this layered design, and advocates for a system where the architecture and the programming model runtime system are able to exchange information towards a common goal, improve performance and reduce power consumption. By making the architecture aware of runtime information such as a Task Dependency Graph (TDG) in the case of dataflow task-based programming models, it is possible to improve power consumption by exploiting the critical path of the graph. Moreover, the architecture can provide hardware support to create such a graph in order to reduce the runtime overheads and making possible the execution of fine-grained tasks to increase the available parallelism. Finally, the current status of inter-node communication primitives can be exposed to the runtime system in order to perform a more efficient communication scheduling, and also creates new opportunities of computation and communication overlap that were not possible before. An evaluation of the proposals introduced in this thesis is provided and a methodology to simulate and characterize the application behavior is also presented.El aumento del paralelismo proporcionado por los sistemas de cómputo modernos ha provocado la necesidad de una visión holística en el diseño de arquitecturas multiprocesador que tome en cuenta las necesidades de los modelos de programación y las aplicaciones. Hoy en día el diseño de los computadores consiste en diferentes capas de abstracción con una interfaz bien definida entre ellas. Las limitaciones de esta aproximación junto con el fin de la ley de Moore limitan el potencial de los futuros computadores. La mayoría de las mejoras actuales en el diseño de los computadores provienen fundamentalmente de la reducción del tamaño del canal del transistor, lo cual permite chips más rápidos y con un consumo eficiente sin apenas cambios fundamentales en el diseño de la arquitectura. Sin embargo, la tecnología actual está alcanzando limitaciones físicas donde no será posible reducir el tamaño de los transistores motivando así un cambio de paradigma en la construcción de los computadores. Esta tesis propone romper este diseño en capas y abogar por un sistema donde la arquitectura y el sistema de tiempo de ejecución del modelo de programación sean capaces de intercambiar información para alcanzar una meta común: La mejora del rendimiento y la reducción del consumo energético. Haciendo que la arquitectura sea consciente de la información disponible en el modelo de programación, como puede ser el grafo de dependencias entre tareas en los modelos de programación dataflow, es posible reducir el consumo energético explotando el camino critico del grafo. Además, la arquitectura puede proveer de soporte hardware para crear este grafo con el objetivo de reducir el overhead de construir este grado cuando la granularidad de las tareas es demasiado fina. Finalmente, el estado de las comunicaciones entre nodos puede ser expuesto al sistema de tiempo de ejecución para realizar una mejor planificación de las comunicaciones y creando nuevas oportunidades de solapamiento entre cómputo y comunicación que no eran posibles anteriormente. Esta tesis aporta una evaluación de todas estas propuestas, así como una metodología para simular y caracterizar el comportamiento de las aplicacionesPostprint (published version