eCommons

 

Using General-Purpose Processor Cores as Prefetching Engines in Chip Multiprocessor Architectures

Other Titles

Abstract

Scaling the performance of applications with little thread-level parallelism is one of the most serious impediments to the success of multi-core architectures. At the same time, the long latency of memory accesses represents one of the largest performance bottlenecks for individual program threads. As a result, a typical microprocessor spends a significant amount of time waiting for data to be delivered from memory instead of performing useful computation. Fortunately, it is often possible to guess which memory data will be needed by a program thread in the near future. Various hardware and software prefetching techniques have been developed to fetch critical data before they are requested by the processor. This way prefetching can eliminate processor stalls otherwise induced by the slow response from the memory system. The main contribution of this dissertation is the development of two techniques that utilize extra cores of a chip multiprocessor (CMP) as prefetching engines to increase the performance of single program threads. The proposed approaches effectively leverage the execution capabilities of chip multiprocessors to compute data addresses that are likely to miss in the cache and prefetch them ahead of program thread load requests. I demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches by performing cycle-accurate simulations of a chip multiprocessor consisting of two four-way superscalar cores running the single-threaded SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite. The proposed mechanisms provide significant performance improvements over a baseline that already includes an aggressive hardware stream prefetcher. A comparison with other multi-core prefetching mechanisms from the literature shows that the techniques proposed in this dissertation provide competitive performance, incur less energy overhead, and require considerably simpler hardware support.

Journal / Series

Volume & Issue

Description

Sponsorship

Date Issued

2007-07-20T11:47:16Z

Publisher

Keywords

computer engineering; computer architecture; chip multiprocessor; prefetching

Location

Effective Date

Expiration Date

Sector

Employer

Union

Union Local

NAICS

Number of Workers

Committee Chair

Committee Co-Chair

Committee Member

Degree Discipline

Degree Name

Degree Level

Related Version

Related DOI

Related To

Related Part

Based on Related Item

Has Other Format(s)

Part of Related Item

Related To

Related Publication(s)

Link(s) to Related Publication(s)

References

Link(s) to Reference(s)

Previously Published As

Government Document

ISBN

ISMN

ISSN

Other Identifiers

Rights

Rights URI

Types

Accessibility Feature

Accessibility Hazard

Accessibility Summary

Link(s) to Catalog Record