Browsing by Subject "On chip memory"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
On-chip memory space partitioning for chip multiprocessors using polyhedral algebra
(The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2010) Ozturk, O.; Kandemir, M.; Irwin, M. J.
One of the most important issues in designing a chip multiprocessor is to decide its on-chip memory organisation. While it is possible to design an application-specific memory architecture, this may not necessarily be the best option, in particular when storage demands of individual processors and/or their data sharing patterns can change from one point in execution to another for the same application. Here, two problems are formulated. First, we show how a polyhedral method can be used to design, for array-based data-intensive embedded applications, an application-specific hybrid memory architecture that has both shared and private components. We evaluate the resulting memory configurations using a set of benchmarks and compare them to pure private and pure shared memory on-chip multiprocessor architectures. The second approach proposed consider dynamic configuration of software-managed on-chip memory space to adapt to the runtime variations in data storage demand and interprocessor sharing patterns. The proposed framework is fully implemented using an optimising compiler, a polyhedral tool, and a memory partitioner (based on integer linear programming), and is tested using a suite of eight data-intensive embedded applications. © 2010 © The Institution of Engineering and Technology.
Open Access
Shared scratch pad memory space management across applications
(Inderscience Publishers, 2009) Ozturk, Ozcan; Kandemir, M.; Son, S. W.; Kolcu, I.
Scratch Pad Memories (SPMs) have received considerable attention lately as on-chip memory building blocks. The main characteristic that distinguishes an SPM from a conventional cache memory is that the data flow is controlled by software. The main focus of this paper is the management of an SPM space shared by multiple applications that can potentially share data. The proposed approach has three major components; a compiler analysis phase, a runtime space partitioner, and a local partitioning phase. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach leads to minimum completion time among all alternate memory partitioning schemes tested.
Open Access
Using data compression for increasing memory system utilization
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2009-06) Ozturk, O.; Kandemir, M.; Irwin, M. J.
The memory system presents one of the critical challenges in embedded system design and optimization. This is mainly due to the ever-increasing code complexity of embedded applications and the exponential increase seen in the amount of data they manipulate. The memory bottleneck is even more important for multiprocessor-system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) architectures due to the high cost of off-chip memory accesses in terms of both energy and performance. As a result, reducing the memory-space occupancy of embedded applications is very important and will be even more important in the next decade. While it is true that the on-chip memory capacity of embedded systems is continuously increasing, the increases in the complexity of embedded applications and the sizes of the data sets they process are far greater. Motivated by this observation, this paper presents and evaluates a compiler-driven approach to data compression for reducing memory-space occupancy. Our goal is to study how automated compiler support can help in deciding the set of data elements to compress/ decompress and the points during execution at which these compressions/decompressions should be performed. We first study this problem in the context of single-core systems and then extend it to MPSoCs where we schedule compressions and decompressions intelligently such that they do not conflict with application execution as much as possible. Particularly, in MPSoCs, one needs to decide which processors should participate in the compression and decompression activities at any given point during the course of execution. We propose both static and dynamic algorithms for this purpose. In the static scheme, the processors are divided into two groups: those performing compression/ decompression and those executing the application, and this grouping is maintained throughout the execution of the application. In the dynamic scheme, on the other hand, the execution starts with some grouping but this grouping can change during the course of execution, depending on the dynamic variations in the data access pattern. Our experimental results show that, in a single-core system, the proposed approach reduces maximum memory occupancy by 47.9% and average memory occupancy by 48.3% when averaged over all the benchmarks. Our results also indicate that, in an MPSoC, the average energy saving is 12.7% when all eight benchmarks are considered. While compressions and decompressions and related bookkeeping activities take extra cycles and memory space and consume additional energy, we found that the improvements they bring from the memory space, execution cycles, and energy perspectives are much higher than these overheads. © 2009 IEEE.