A Near-Memory Processor for Vector, Streaming and Bit Manipulation Workloads

Wei, Mingliang; Snir, Marc; Torrellas, Josep; Tremaine, R. Brett

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/11011 Copy

Description

Title

A Near-Memory Processor for Vector, Streaming and Bit Manipulation Workloads

Author(s)

• Wei, Mingliang
• Snir, Marc
• Torrellas, Josep
• Tremaine, R. Brett

Issue Date

2005-02

Keyword(s)

Computer Architecture Parallel Computing

Abstract

Many important scientific and engineering applications execute sub-optimally on current commodity processors and servers. Specifically, since they frequently use caches ineffectively, they are often heavily bottlenecked by global memory bandwidth. In addition, they sometimes need to perform expensive bit manipulation operations that are not efficiently supported by commodity ISAs. Moreover, an analysis of technology trends suggests that, despite the criticality of some of these applications, future commodity processors and servers are unlikely to be tuned for them. To address this problem, this paper proposes the design of a simple co-processor on which the main processor can off-load vector, streaming, and bit-manipulation computation. The co-processor is a blocked-multithreaded narrow in-order core with support for vectors, streams, and bit manipulation. It has no caches and a high bandwidth to memory. For this reason, rather than for its actual physical location, we call it Near-Memory Processor (NMP). Our simulations show that a set of scientific applications run much faster on the NMP than on an aggressive conventional processor. Specifically, the speedups obtained reach 18, with a geometric mean of 5.8 for 10 applications.

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11011

Copyright and License Information

You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, BUT this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).

Owning Collections