Title:
Bridging Processor and Memory Performance in ILP Processors via Data-Remapping
Bridging Processor and Memory Performance in ILP Processors via Data-Remapping
Author(s)
Rabbah, Rodric Michel
Palem, Krishna V.
Palem, Krishna V.
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Abstract
Current system design trends continue to magnify the disparity between
processor and memory performance. Thus, as microprocessors perform
increasingly better than the mem-ory systems supporting them, it is ever
more important to bridge the performance gap to help translate the promise
of Moore s law into overall performance delivered to the end applica-tions.
This gap in performance between the processor and the memory is further
exacerbated in the context of modern processors with high-levels of
instruction level parallelism (ILP), especially for data-intensive
applications. In these processors, increased demands for data delivery lead
to concomitant needs for higher memory bandwidth and cache sizes. In this
paper we provide a fast compile-time data-remapping technique which helps in
bridging the gap between the ILP processor and its memory system, by
enhancing the spatial locality of data-access. Our strategy is the first
automatic approach applicable to pointer-intensive dy-namic applications for
which existing optimizations are mostly inadequate. We demonstrate an
average performance improvement of 27% for several data-intensive
applications. This is attributed to enhanced data locality, resulting in
lowered demand on the bandwidth between cache levels, as well as between the
cache subsystem and main memory. We also show that with increasing levels of
ILP and fixed memory bandwidth, our remapping technique enables very high
levels of performance with smaller cache sizes. For example, as much as a
factor of 15 reduction in multi-level caches can be tolerated without a loss
in performance. Although we use cycle-accurate simulators to detail the
benefits of our remapping, we also measure 24% performance improvements for
the Intel Pentium II and III processors, and a 9% yield on the Sun
UltraSparc-II.
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Date Issued
2001
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326058 bytes
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Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report